World Wide Chip Shortage Means End Of Future Designs from Hobby Users?

The world wide greed for short term profits is eviscerating future designs. All manufacturing is geared towards the multi-million dollar customers. No capacity is left over for the million dollar customers.

I counted over 50,000 PSOC5LP orders of various kinds for Mouser. That has a retail value of 1 million to 2 million dollars. It does not include PSOC 4, PSOC 3, PSOC 6 orders. And it is only one customer.

In my estimation, flawed though it may be, the distributor network in the world has $10 million to $20 million dollars outstanding for PSOC5 parts. These parts are being listed as 101 week lead times.

I don’t know about you, but if a small business is using these parts, it can’t wait for 2 years to build a new board, before it has to close its doors.

In addition, the small hobby market is suffering. This will be a disaster for chip manufacturers. Why?

I’ll tell you why – – where do you think the cheap 3D printers came from? From the hobby market after the expiration of patents. And what is that market size now? Millions of dollars. Millions.

Can you say Arduino? The search for short term profits is a disaster for the future. However, corporations have no understanding of the future. They only understand the stock price for the current quarter.

Kodak only understood the stock price for the current quarter. General Motors did too. Mostek did too. IBM did too, and lost the PC market altogether. It is a smaller version of its previous greatness.

MySpace, Toys R Us, KMart, Sears. Blockbuster. I can do research and come up with hundreds of companies that ignored future customers (by stifling R&D that paid attention to the little guy) and paid with their very existence.

Fini

Unfortunately, companies don’t have a soul. They don’t have a conscience. They don’t have morals.

We (the little guys) always pay the price.

Don’t Enjoy. But be ready for the coming tsunami of unmitigated disaster in the innovation space formerly occupied by entrepreneurs.