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One picks their partners. It's certainly not the first time things have gone badly wrong when picking a partner, and you'd think that as a bunch of techies they

One picks their partners. It's certainly not the first time things have gone badly wrong when picking a partner, and you'd think that as a bunch of techies they might have seen this coming. It's clear they chose their partners based on their manufacturing chops, rather than their retail chops. To be fair, RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities. Arguably what Raspberry Pi could/should have done was use Arduino's model of having licensed manufacturers and they could have sat in front of it, and, as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread, just ship giant boxes to Amazon to actually do all the dirty work. This would have covered the US, Europe and Japan (if you ship to all Amazon's fulfillment centers), which would have been plenty I think.

DanBC 15y ago
They're both part of large international companies. This first shipment is disappointing to many people. Hopefully crashing the servers so hard will give both these distributors some idea of what the demand is, and they'll get some large production runs going, and shift some stock to international distribution partners. > RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities. RS is where you go when you have an account and need small amounts of components on a regular basis. Buying large quantities of components results in a very frustrating experience. See, for example, the way they sell surface mount components. Buy qty 500 of 0805 SM resistors and Farnell will send you a strip of 500 while RS will sell you 50 little strips of 10 per strip. Or the way that individual parts are bagged.