If by "common man" you mean anyone not doing a commercial design with 
production run cost the overriding factor in uC choice, I'm not 
surprised.  The hobbyist world, in particular, has more or less 
abandoned microchip for AVRs, and for good reason.  Until very recently 
there hasn't been a free C compiler for PICs (18F anyway), and microchip 
has chosen to keep their debugging interface on the 18F series 
undocumented.  This means no open-source, low-cost tools for doing 
anything besides programming the chip.  I don't know if this will have a 
material impact long-term, but anyone who asks me for advice about 
microcontrollers (this would be the relatively inexperienced asking) I 
tell them to go AVR and not PIC.

Jesse



James Newton, Host wrote:
> This is interesting:
> 
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=microchip+pic%2C+msp430%2C+h8%2C+ez80+%2C+atm
> el+avr&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2007&sort=0
> 
> The Atmel AVR seems to be the only one that is gaining interest. If you
> change it to look at all years, you can see this is a long term trend. All
> search volume is dropping in this area.
> 
> Are there others that we should look at? 
> 
> What is the current "hot" uC in terms of what the common man is interested
> in learning about? 
> 
> ---
> James.
>  
> 
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