Reflections on the hardware industry

I'm sure you're right about the rational behaviour of big suppliers paying virtually all of their attention to big customers.

(Being a smaller customer, I know what it's like to receive zero attention from the big supplier, and the middle company who supplies me seems unable span the gap, resulting in chips which are quite capable, but grossly underutilised because the software for them is poor quality and closed to improvements.)

But I think Harald has a point in noticing that the big customers have many downstream smaller customers who want FOSS (and other forms of access) available for the platform, and the big suppliers have many internal suppliers who are ready and willing to provide FOSS (and other forms of access) to the platform, that all this would save everyone time and money, yet somehow, in the middle, the opportunity to connect these desires is lost.

In other words, I think Harald has a point that the rational behaviour of big suppliers and their big customers does not even produce what the big customer's customers what. Somehow the desires pass along the supply chain very slowly.

I suspect that's because most of the work done in this field has a certain "way it's done" which is really hard to change. Harald's observation about the companies in the middle is spot on:

"Those intermediaries (OEM/ODM) typically have very limited skill and understanding about anything related to Software, not even talking about FOSS. They know how to make many boards cheap. In fact, their skill typically is so low that all they can use for their products are so-called turnkey solutions: A full reference board design and complete software stack that they can copy+paste with only the most superficial modifications."

That "turnkey" approach in the intermediaries is probably getting in the way of more innovative and diverse potential downstream customers having their desires aggregated into big contracts at the 1M+ scale.

There's an opportunity in that, but I've no idea how to go about fulfilling it.

(Other observations about "intermediary" companies. 1. If there are significant bugs in the reference design, the small downstream customer is often stuck with them because the intermediary lacks the skill, resources or motivation to fix them, and the small downstream customer has limited access/permission to fix bugs despite often having the technical ability. They may even be prohibited by license from doing so. 2. There's an awful lot of wheel reinvention and working in closed groups. Fixes to kernels don't get mainlined; fixes to drivers remain as patches in obscure private trees, and even trivial board-specific or chip-specific drivers are provided as binary-only blobs.)