Wow, Raspberry Pi's Eben and Liz visited Taipei. RS Components held a convention in FutureWard . And I'm honored to give a talk about why Raspberry Pi is popular(successful). The following are the 20 slides I used and the brief descriptions.
Why Raspberry Pi is popular? This is a difficult question. I am not a trend expert or an experienced analyst. Neither do I have backdoor straight to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Well, however, I'm interested in this question and try to provide some explanations. Caution: just some biased thoughts.
You got to have a goal. And the purpose of the charity organization Raspberry Pi Foundation is about education. That makes it very different.
You got to have a good team. Not only engineers, you also need to have masters accountable for other aspcts. Including an iconic figure to show on media and non-technicians to grow the community. Once set the goal and have a good work group, the rest just follows.
Naming is hard. Picking a good name is harder. It has to be unique. Well, even better to have a cute logo(icon) and a mascot. (Ubuntu, for god's sake, please abandon those bizarre codenames.)
First thing first, the product which you can hold on your hand. On the first sale day of Raspberry Pi Model B, it's a complete product. Robust, beautiful, decent, and just works. Although this should be a basic requirement, many other products out there don't satisfy.
We are not Apple who are willing to and able to control everything. So please utilize the already-built resources. When I kew that Raspbian is based on Debian, it made me relieve. Please don't make some small changes and add little new things, then call it a new name. By known familiar things, it will lower the enter barrier for the newbies.
Many hackers blamed the Foundation for not being real open. I don't think that is an issue. You have open something enough to let makers play, and not-open something to keep the profit.
From the first day, Raspberry Pi sells and distributes to the whole world. In this global villiage era, this seems not so big. However, many other boards don't.
The price of Raspberry Pi just hits the sweet point. Great!
Hardware spec is boring. Everybody likes to hear stories. Even before we could buy Raspberry Pi, there exists the blog website(and later Twitter) recording happings around it and tells us the story about the Raspberry Pi. Though the representative type of Raspberry Pi is Eben, I personally think the main driving force behind the success story of Raspberry Pi is Liz, the one who tells good stores about Pi.
What? Website? Are you kidding me? In the web version x.0 age, why should I put this as a factor of the success of Raspberry Pi? Well, please compare other boards' website, Raspberry Pi's website is just clean and elegant, period. There is no blah blah blah non-sense text. The English text is of high quality. Not too hard to read, and not too shabby such let natively-English-speakers think it's something bad.
Besides the execellent story-teller Liz, in the forum, there are also exists somebodies from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. They answer your questions, attract the early-adapters, and enrich the forum accumulating lots of Q and A. It's not an easy thing you could do it on spare time. It needs dedicated man and time.
I think the Raspberry Pi just came into a good time. The Arduino(and other microcontrollers) users want to upgrade to next level. The 32-bit ARM dev board users want something cheaper. And a lot of newcomers want to enter this area.
The above shows the main reasons I reckon as to lead to success of Raspberry Pi. The followings sometimes are the consequences of the previous factors. Sometimes are the causes of themselves, enabling them to go stronger.
Once you have a group of fans and enthusiasts, who are willing and happy to share, the community will get larger and larger. Attract makers from other camps.
Community is very import. So I put on two slides. Fans share with each other, attract more fans.
Even better, an ecosystem established. They start to build products around Raspberry Pi.
You can't just have a product and a datasheet. Please take a look at Adafruit. Pretty website listing execellent products, not only that, they provides detail tutorials and responsive forum.
The story doesn't end here. Raspberry Pi is still forwarding to the goal: education.
Thanks all. Let me stress this point again: just some biased personal opinions.
