press report favors Farnell

All I know is that RS must be loosing money by the bucketload over this, I don't work in a technical environment so i'm not going to know many other people that are interested or even aware of the Pi, but for both of the people that I know that did order from RS, both have cancelled. One re-ordered from CPC and had one in 48 hours, the other went and found something else to play with.

If it is because Broadcom can't supply the chips fast enough, I can't imagine RS aren't going to be happy ? I thought I read somewhere that the manufacturers have to put in advanced orders, so could it be that RS just misunderstood the great demand there would be ?

so could it be that RS just misunderstood the great demand there would be ?

Possible, but seems unlikely. You don't put up a 'register your interest' page, build a seperate supply chain, ordering mechanism etc. if you don't have some idea it's going to be big.

Details of confidential contracts between different companies aside, you'd have thought that someone either on the broadcom side or the chinese manufacturing side would have been able to see the discrepancy between RS/Farnell orders and push things in the right direction long before it became the big public problem it now has.

Alternately, RS must have known what it's allocation and lead times from Broadcom were well in advance. Continuing to take orders at what seems to have been massively higher numbers than expected seems like a bad decision.

Fine, keep taking expressions of interest, just warn of the potential lead times and don't promote those to actual orders. Continuing to take money for something they now know they don't have the capacity to deliver anytime soon is IMHO a bad idea, and as that's their decision they can't blame broadcom for it.

I take the point about the infrastructure they built around the ordering process, but I always wondered if that was to keep what they considered was the core part of their business separate. When I called Farnell about my Pi, they were more than happy to deal with it over the phone, but when doing the same with RS as soon as I mentioned Raspberry I was told they couldn't help and I could only e-mail.

I know it isn't much of a sample, but I get the feeling Farnell integrated it much more into the BAU stuff, whereas RS bolted stuff on to handle it. At one point, I was told emailing woud get me a response in 10 days, so it doesn't really feel like they really knew what they were taking on?

Completely agree as to why someone from Broadcom didn't have a word in RS's ear and ask why their orders were an order of magnitude different from Farnell.

I know it isn't much of a sample, but I get the feeling Farnell integrated it much more into the BAU stuff, whereas RS bolted stuff on to handle it. At one point, I was told emailing woud get me a response in 10 days, so it doesn't really feel like they really knew what they were taking on?

It's the whole bolting stuff on bit I can't really get my head around. RS effectively built a seperate company just to deal with the Pi, and that makes no sense to me if you think it's going to be low volume. The cost of setting up, staffing and running this bolton for a low margin product you don't expect to sell a lot of just doesn't add up.

Anyway, water under the bridge now. But if, as John suggests, there's a 23 week lead time then they're a long way from climbing out of that hole.. and yet they keep digging ?  Am I the only one who thinks that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever ?

I know it isn't much of a sample, but I get the feeling Farnell integrated it much more into the BAU stuff, whereas RS bolted stuff on to handle it. At one point, I was told emailing woud get me a response in 10 days, so it doesn't really feel like they really knew what they were taking on?

It's the whole bolting stuff on bit I can't really get my head around. RS effectively built a seperate company just to deal with the Pi, and that makes no sense to me if you think it's going to be low volume. The cost of setting up, staffing and running this bolton for a low margin product you don't expect to sell a lot of just doesn't add up.

Anyway, water under the bridge now. But if, as John suggests, there's a 23 week lead time then they're a long way from climbing out of that hole.. and yet they keep digging ?  Am I the only one who thinks that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever ?

selsinork wrote:

Anyway, water under the bridge now. But if, as John suggests, there's a 23 week lead time then they're a long way from climbing out of that hole.. and yet they keep digging ?  Am I the only one who thinks that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever ?

Absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Whatever has happened has happened, but as soon as you realise it, surely that is the time to stop and do something about it ?

And because it makes no sense whatsoever, I don't think that that's what occurred.

"1) It can be explained by X; 2) X is ridiculous; 3) X actually happened" seems rather doubtful reasoning to me, if one is examining likelihoods.  Growth of the waiting list is directly calculable under those circumstances after all, no hindsight needed.  It seems very unlikely that they knowingly took that route.

There is a lot more to this issue than meets the eye, IMO.  The simple explanation above doesn't even have RPF involved as a middleman or deal broker, so it seems to be missing a key element.

so it seems to be missing a key element.

yes, they're missing element14

seriously though, you're absolutely correct, I just don't think we'll ever find out what really happened.

"1) It can be explained by X; 2) X is ridiculous; 3) X actually happened" seems rather doubtful reasoning to me, if one is examinijng likelihoods.

Have you ever worked for a really big company ?  I'm thinking top 10 Fortune500 type of big here.  That sort of reasoning is exactly the way management types minds seem to work, the bigger the company the crazier the decisions - IME at least.