By "Going Public" the Raspberry Pi Ensures It'll No Longer Serve the Public
It'll be owned and controlled by whatever people wish to control it
"Eben begins his exit strategy with an irreversible step towards loss of control," an associate notes today, linking to news of the IPO. I said it is called "exit" for a reason and the associate responded: "It's sad for RPi but sadder for all the people who were actually learning to program and do electronics via the Pi. It had only recently started to regain the momentum lost during the factory shutdowns during the lockdowns."
We actually wrote about this weeks ago and also months ago. There's no real need to do this, but it's all about money. In some ways, money ruins things.
When I was at the bank earlier today (I reported technical issues to them [1, 2]) they couldn't quite grasp why people would save instead of borrow and take risks. In the business world, even companies that claim (in vain) to be worth trillions take hundreds of billions in debt, saying it would help them "grow". That's nonsense.
As we've just explained, Microsoft is faking all sorts of things. It is not actually doing well, there are already mass layoffs this month (thousands fired), and this idea that "going public" or taking debt means "growth" is MBA mindset on steroids. As someone put it here yesterday, "they mean stock price growth through stock buybacks". 18 minutes ago another person said: "The core values of IBM's founders were supplanted by Milton Friedman's ideas on shareholder primacy. Senior executives focus on money, cash flow and stock prices because that is all they know, and that is all they care about. Everything else that you see is just a means to that end." █