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What makes you think it's the OSHW community? If TI will work with you only if you're high vol then I could see a lot of smaller businesses seeing this tactic w

• cushychicken 6y ago
  In TI's eyes - that is, through the lens of order volume and support needed by the customer from TI - the difference between a single small business building HW and a single OSHW is negligible. They get way more ROI by heavily supporting bigCos who will give them millions of dollars of business YOY rather than helping a zillion mom and pop shops who can barely wire a resistor the right way. Think of it as a tacit strategy of "firing your worst customers". Having worked in bigCo vs small Co, there are a lot of small Co and OSHW EEs who barely have a clue what they're doing. It's not worth TI's time or money to help these people out. Upleveling lousy engineers thru support only to net them a 10 piece part order, is a really lousy ROI. (Unless of course we're talking an ASIC or some other astronomically high ROI custom piece. But, I'm assuming that we're not, because I don't work for a military prime contractor.)