Last night on Twitter someone asked us a question, basically asking why they should trust GHI and TinyCLR after discontinuing our Gadgeteer product line. Here is a link to that tweet.
We decided to answer the question on the forum directly as it is a legitimate question as a lot of customers have put money and time into Gadgeteer. And the answer is more complicated than 140 words (maybe). **EDIT:140 characters, not words **
As stated in the news post made roughly 6 months ago announcing the retirement of our Gadgeteer product line, please see quote below, the decision was an extremely hard decision to make as we as individuals love the Gadgeteer concept. However, in the end Gadgeteer was a software and hardware template created my Microsoft Research and owned my Microsoft and not GHI. After several companies abandoned Gadgeteer we continued on to fight for it to become a product and not a research project. We did this for 3 - 4 years by ourselves and with the help of a few very energetic individuals. It came to a point that regardless of personal feelings it no longer made since to continue pouring resources into Gadgeteer from the view point of “the business”. With all of that being said, we still love Gadgeteer so much that we are currently working with a few companies to bring Gadgeteer back who have the resources to bring it to the next level (announcement coming soon).
As you may or may not know TinyCLR OS is based on NETMF, however, we are currently in control of it and can guide the direction of the product. Which this was not the case with NETMF or Gadgeteer and because we can control the resources put into it, you are now seeing regular releases with major features in each release. And this will continue to happen as the product matures.
So, in short, [em]it is because of our passion and history of dedication to NETMF and Gadgeteer that you can trust in TinyCLR and it’s future[/em].
I would have thought that GHI’s willingness to let a failing product line die an honourable death, was a good indicator that GHI can be trusted; as opposed to letting that decay infect the entire company, resulting in GHI’s certain death.
“Here at GHI we do whatever it takes to keep the company going to support our customers; even if it means chopping off our gangrene leg. Don’t worry though, we have plans to grow a new one in the winter. - Cave John… err I mean Gus Issa”
I was as heavily invested into Gadgeteer as anyone and don’t regret a moment of it as I thoroughly enjoyed working with Gadgeteer and GHI. Ultimately at Microsoft someone made a management based decision to end Gadgeteer which perhaps made sense to them as a logical business decision, but GHI is different in that they are passionate about their products and believed in Gadgeteer as a worthy concept and stuck with it to the point they were the only guys left in the game (without Visual Studio help it really was impossible to continue as is). There still remains some folks at Microsoft who believed in the Gadgeteer concept, but big companies tend to dilute passions with shareholder demands, whereas at GHI the shareholders are the folks with passions for the products and their customers. What other company has the big cheese answering questions at all hours of the day to say nothing about the photo orientation challenged employee that also answers questions at all hours of the day (other then during the 3 lunches breaks per day). They do this not because they have to but because they want to. It was always a pleasure to deal with a company that shared my level of passion for a product, where I was more then just a customer, we were fellow makers where success and information are openly shared. This community is a reflection of that. There are some scary smart folks in here, and yet no egos, just constructive discussions where I learned tons and hopefully was able to share some of what I learned with others.
Ultimately GHI is why small companies are always better then big companies and examples of why you can trust them to follow their passions. Mega huge companies like Microsoft have shareholders (often these are cold black hole hedge fund and investment houses who care for nothing but money and are a plague upon humanity) who expect maximum monetary return on their investment, whereas small companies like GHI also value things other then monetary returns for their investment of time and effort. In short you can trust a Maker to Make as it is what they love to do more then anything else and GHI are very capable Makers.
Let the record show I agree with everything that has been said so far in this thread with one significant exception. I firmly believe that Duke’s characterization of hedge funds, and by extension hedge fund managers, understates their despicability by at least 2 orders of magnitude.
