5 ms·

Why though? This is clearly a problem I just don't understand what the vendors are getting out of it.

dgfitz 1y ago
I think the short answer is because manufacturers don’t care.
ACCount36 1y ago
Perhaps they think that by forcing everyone to go through the sales dept just to get the basic docs, they'll get better sales opportunities. How do you upsell a hardware engineer who just wants to buy a specific chip, and already has everything to evaluate and use it? You don't. So you force everyone to go through sales, and then sales wants to talk to non-engineering higher-ups, and then the upsell happens - while the people who actually knew what they wanted remain as far away as possible. And if you don't have the pockets deep enough for the sales dept to acknowledge your existence, then you might as well not exist.
- stephen_g 1y ago
  They don’t care about ‘upselling’ - it’s just that they only really care about the orders that are at least in the tens of thousands of units (or for the Broadcoms of the world, hundreds of thousands) per year, and ongoing. If you even promise to buy a few hundred a year through a business, it puts you in a different category and everything gets much easier, but you usually have to go via a distributor (Avnet, Future, Arrow etc.). But if you’re big enough (the hundreds of thousands + qtys) these companies will actually send dedicated support engineers to work with you and help you integrate their parts into your product.
Aurornis 1y ago
When you get into high volume production, the vendors have their own engineers who will work with you directly. Depending on the arrangement and your volume they might bill you for the time, require you to buy blocks of support hours, or they might bend over backward to help you out in any way possible if you’re buying enough parts from them. Dealing with small clients is not a priority for most part vendors. Many of them won’t even sell you chips at all until you can qualify yourself as a big customer or, in some cases, buy a license to start designing with their parts for six figures or more. Unfortunately for the small players, it’s not a priority for most companies to support small customers who might only buy a couple thousand parts or less.
gosub100 1y ago
Guessing: if you publish too much about your design, competitors can use it against you during sales negotiations. "Don't buy theirs, ours has better pin placement, better IF, better thermals, etc"
rcxdude 1y ago
There's certainly cases where the documentation basically doesn't exist, or it's essentially the same as the design documentation, and the strategy is basically that if you're a big enough customer then you'll be getting some engineer time to make things work, and if you're a smaller customer you'll be told to pound sand anyway, it's not worth them fixing up their documentation to get your business. Generally the more complex and specialised the hardware the more it'll look like this, and it basically saves them on R&D because they have only a few applications to actually focus on.
Kirby64 1y ago
Because creating good documentation suitable for external consumers costs money, and even if you have decent documentation, people buying small quantities of parts can end up costing companies money just to interact with one of their application engineers. If you're not set up for it (very few companies are), it literally is negative value to answer support questions for small time customers.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  I'm not sure how your answer relates to the question about why they won't release documentation they already have. Are you saying that releasing documentation is going to increase the number of support questions? If you want to sell or limit support, why not do that without the documentation complications?
  - Kirby64 1y ago
    > Are you saying that releasing documentation is going to increase the number of support questions? Yes, absolutely. Notoriously, smaller customers are more needy in fact. The bigger the customer, the more competent their engineers tend to be (or, the more time they have to spend figuring out how to use your stuff). Smaller customers try to offload support onto vendors, which pushes burden onto internal vendor teams (who don't want to provide the support...).
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Smaller customers are more needy, sure, but there's a couple steps missing here. Is better public documentation going to bring in a lot more small customers, more than it solves problems? Is an NDA by itself keeping away lots of small customers?
      - Kirby64 1y ago
        > Is better public documentation going to bring in a lot more small customers, more than it solves problems? Maybe. The other thing is that public documentation gets a lot more scrutiny than internal documentation. You don't have any resource to talk to, so something like typos or mistakes need to be corrected rather than just papered over by a helpful applications engineer.
bgnn 1y ago
Because the margin per chip is low and supporting more customers cost more. They sell these parts for couple of bucks/part at volume, although it costs 20-30 million NRE. With the fixed production costs added, they have tens of cents per part margin. At that point less than 1M part customer becomes irrelevant.

I think the short answer is because manufacturers don’t care.

Perhaps they think that by forcing everyone to go through the sales dept just to get the basic docs, they'll get better sales opportunities. How do you upsell a hardware engineer who just wants to buy a specific chip, and already has everything to evaluate and use it? You don't. So you force everyone to go through sales, and then sales wants to talk to non-engineering higher-ups, and then the upsell happens - while the people who actually knew what they wanted remain as far away as possible. And if you don't have the pockets deep enough for the sales dept to acknowledge your existence, then you might as well not exist.

stephen_g 1y ago
They don’t care about ‘upselling’ - it’s just that they only really care about the orders that are at least in the tens of thousands of units (or for the Broadcoms of the world, hundreds of thousands) per year, and ongoing. If you even promise to buy a few hundred a year through a business, it puts you in a different category and everything gets much easier, but you usually have to go via a distributor (Avnet, Future, Arrow etc.). But if you’re big enough (the hundreds of thousands + qtys) these companies will actually send dedicated support engineers to work with you and help you integrate their parts into your product.

Aurornis 1y ago

When you get into high volume production, the vendors have their own engineers who will work with you directly. Depending on the arrangement and your volume they might bill you for the time, require you to buy blocks of support hours, or they might bend over backward to help you out in any way possible if you’re buying enough parts from them. Dealing with small clients is not a priority for most part vendors. Many of them won’t even sell you chips at all until you can qualify yourself as a big customer or, in some cases, buy a license to start designing with their parts for six figures or more. Unfortunately for the small players, it’s not a priority for most companies to support small customers who might only buy a couple thousand parts or less.

gosub100 1y ago

Guessing: if you publish too much about your design, competitors can use it against you during sales negotiations. "Don't buy theirs, ours has better pin placement, better IF, better thermals, etc"

rcxdude 1y ago

There's certainly cases where the documentation basically doesn't exist, or it's essentially the same as the design documentation, and the strategy is basically that if you're a big enough customer then you'll be getting some engineer time to make things work, and if you're a smaller customer you'll be told to pound sand anyway, it's not worth them fixing up their documentation to get your business. Generally the more complex and specialised the hardware the more it'll look like this, and it basically saves them on R&D because they have only a few applications to actually focus on.

Kirby64 1y ago

Because creating good documentation suitable for external consumers costs money, and even if you have decent documentation, people buying small quantities of parts can end up costing companies money just to interact with one of their application engineers. If you're not set up for it (very few companies are), it literally is negative value to answer support questions for small time customers.

Dylan16807 1y ago
I'm not sure how your answer relates to the question about why they won't release documentation they already have. Are you saying that releasing documentation is going to increase the number of support questions? If you want to sell or limit support, why not do that without the documentation complications?
- Kirby64 1y ago
  > Are you saying that releasing documentation is going to increase the number of support questions? Yes, absolutely. Notoriously, smaller customers are more needy in fact. The bigger the customer, the more competent their engineers tend to be (or, the more time they have to spend figuring out how to use your stuff). Smaller customers try to offload support onto vendors, which pushes burden onto internal vendor teams (who don't want to provide the support...).
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Smaller customers are more needy, sure, but there's a couple steps missing here. Is better public documentation going to bring in a lot more small customers, more than it solves problems? Is an NDA by itself keeping away lots of small customers?
    - Kirby64 1y ago
      > Is better public documentation going to bring in a lot more small customers, more than it solves problems? Maybe. The other thing is that public documentation gets a lot more scrutiny than internal documentation. You don't have any resource to talk to, so something like typos or mistakes need to be corrected rather than just papered over by a helpful applications engineer.

bgnn 1y ago

Because the margin per chip is low and supporting more customers cost more. They sell these parts for couple of bucks/part at volume, although it costs 20-30 million NRE. With the fixed production costs added, they have tens of cents per part margin. At that point less than 1M part customer becomes irrelevant.