The Smartest Companies are in the Same Room, but are not Building New Products Together...for you

 A brief follow up to my previous post, "The State of Stateless Linux (And the Future of Solar Computing)" is about the technology industry as a whole.

Obviously, money drives product development - anticipated revenue streams from new products. But sometimes newer is just cheaper materials, rather than a new feature, which of course, isn't always a bad thing, since the savings can be passed down to the consumer. 

In the Qualcomm case, The UNO Q isn't really innovative in terms of features. It might be a cash cow if Raspberry Pi wants to get out of the consumer division and only focus on corporate/industry customers. That too, isn't always a bad thing- serving consumers where a former company is unable or less willing. After all, Qualcomm has a large patent portfolio, and wouldn't need to outsource every thing or anything. This is the same Qualcomm that wanted to make a bid on Intel to buy them  out, however Intel  & The U.S had "other plans." 

Now, sometimes it might be a good idea to choose your battles wisely. For example, Qualcomm is known more for its mobile chipsets and wireless IP, rather than single board computers. So them amassing a war chest was probably prudent if they decided against that 10 years ago. And of course there are also potential benefits to avoiding tariffs since it is an American company, whereas the UK, however unlikely it would face tariffs to the extent of other countries, could see a surcharge on even a $35 Raspberry Pi.

Even so, product development often follows other successful products, and sometimes it is simpler/easier to develop a cheaper product that does the same thing at the same energy consumption for a lower cost, than something that uses significantly less power for the same price- because energy is still cheap, especially at the low end where devices consume just a couple watts of power.

There are certainly countless instances where companies work together to build a product- an EUV machine isn't built by one company, for example, but uses a laser from Germany and materials from the U.S. and Asia:

There are other kinds of "cooperation", of course, such as "no-poach":

A lot of times success depends on a few limited players who have the time to market and develop a product before anyone else, and true competition in a free market is rarely as fair as it is encouraged.

But what happens when the sucesssful cases become complacent? They rarely, pro-actively innovate, unless they have some guilt or a conscience.

So instead, they, the smartest people and companies in the room, gather at conferences, exchange notes, and informally focus on non-competing products in markets that don't interact, or if they do, at a minimum. It's far easier to control competition when, as Lincoln would do - he keeps his friends close, and his enemies closer (in the tent).

AI, despite all its hype, in 2025, is already considered a safer investment than legacy 32-bit linux products for the consumer market, because the reach is far greater. When you can sell 100,000 IP cameras with AI-enhanced motion detection, your most reliable and highest paying customers are surveillance customers who need panopticon technology for small business warehouses in a crime-ridden town.

In other words semiconductor companies aren't going to profit as much from a smaller market of 8-9 billion humans, when they can sell a trillion IP cameras to a few thousand companies. So that's all Big Tech is doing these days. Meeting at conferences like a plenary session for planetary domination. So it's not enough to just follow the mainstream linux anymore. Ordinary individuals have been left behind.

Open source/ Free software hobbyists who want anything more than retro technology products are going to need to consider more leading edge solutions. And forking, if necessary.