Corporate Personalities

For over 20 years, I have been mining industry for the components needed to construct technomadic adventure tools: Winnebiko, Winnebiko II, BEHEMOTH, Microship in its various incarnations, and now Shacktopus. I have been very fortunate to be able to conjure a sort of 3-way symbiosis of project, media, and sponsorship that has allowed me to build a career out of this without having to simultaneously "get a real job."

Along the way, I've dealt with a lot of companies... and a lot of people who represent them. I remember once, in the BEHEMOTH era, contacting an east coast vendor of panel-mount strip printers. The guy was abusive and openly hostile, basically laughing at me for having the gall to propose that they donate one and snidely suggesting that I'd be too stupid to use it anyway. I then called a direct competitor that had apparently spun off of the first company, just down the road in the next town over, and he was delighted... Fedexing one out the same afternoon. I learned from this not to take rejection too seriously, and that it all boils down to personalities.

Now, over a decade later, I'm at it again, assembling the components to build this tiny go-anywhere platform-independent technomadic toolset. And as before, I'm finding that the range of available products and the range of corporate cultures are utterly uncorrelated, and things that seem as if they should be available, in many cases, aren't.

Take development systems for embedded Linux products. I don't know how many times in the past month I've gotten excited about some nifty PXA255/270-based product or other sparkling little board that offers tons of I/O yet still understands power management, only to discover that the manufacturer wants $3-5K for a development system (or worse, openly refuses to talk to anyone who wants less than 10,000 or so units). I know hobbyists can be a nuisance, but where do they think most "outta the blue" ideas come from?

Of course, there's a counter-argument... support calls are expensive, and vendors of complex systems could easily spend all their time hand-holding if they didn't institute some effective up-front filters to make sure they only end up dealing with real engineers. That's why Ned and I haven't gone any further with the Bionode; we just don't have the manpower to handle tech support.

Most of the time, however, I've been pleased and sometimes even surprised by the friendliness of the folks behind the websites. In the past few weeks, I've received excellent support from quite a few companies, some of which have become sponsors (to be featured, of course, in the new Shacktopus pages once they go online). Technologic has taken the time to answer my newbie questions about their ARM-based embedded Linux products, a far cry from those that didn't even acknowledge my request for a quote (since I'm obviously not a manufacturer and only want one unit... for now).

My point here is that this is what tends to shape the technological future... for a huge amount of innovation emerges from the cluttered basement workbenches of mad, driven tinkerers chasing their dreams (passion being a much stronger motivation, usually, than management-decreed development deadlines). The companies that are patient with these random renegades and don't mind selling "onesies" or development tools at sane prices are the ones that end up getting their products featured in Make, Slashdot, BoingBoing, and thousands of individual project websites like this one.

That's a cheap way to build buzz, and without buzz, making it in this industry is a lot more expensive.