On Thursday, Apr 15, 2004, at 12:43 US/Pacific, Richard Zinn wrote:

> Does Microchip purposefully cater to hobbyists?  I don't understand
> that sample policy all that well...  They must lose a lot of money to
> manufacturing and shipping so many samples to hobbyists.  When
> probably 1 in 1000 hobbyists ever build something that is produced in
> mass quantity - enough to make Microchip any money.

You might be surprised.  MOST microcontroller designs are pretty
non-critical in terms of architecture, so you're down to some random
engineer deciding to use a PIC for not better reason than that he used
one in college, or in a hobby project, or read about one in some hobby
magazine.  And ALL of those probably depend on the PIC having been
hobbyist friendly (colleges aren't high-volume buyers, either.)  For
instance, cisco apparently uses quite a significant number of PICs for
things like fan control.  I don't know who decided on PICs for that
use, but I'll bet you a significant amount of money we didn't spend
months and months of research time picking the best microcontroller for
the job.  (We're apparently using some AVRs, too.  And 8051s, and who
knows what else.  Processor proliferation isn't necessarily a GOOD
thing, but this is all down in the noise where it probably doesn't
matter.)

In other words, it's entirely possible that a LARGE percentage of the
money-making (for microchip) PIC applications can be traced back to
their being one of the more hobbyist-friendly controllers.

Not that microchip has been terribly enlightened all along.  Their
sample policy is pretty new, and originally their "hobbyist friendly"
nature rode on the back of distributers like Parallax and digikey.
This has been going on long enough that Microchip probably has a very
good idea of how much they owe to penetrating the hobbyist market, and
of course they know exactly how much they spend on the sample program...

BillW

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