> From a business engagement point of view, making hard to use tools and then "giving away" thousands of dollars of free consulting to the customer to gain their support seems to work well.
To me, the entire recent history of computer industry (well, all of it is recent BTW) shows that, if you want your technology to become mass-adopted, you need to make it easier for the little guy to get in the game. The high school kid tinkering with stuff in the parents' basement; the proverbial starving student. That's how x86 crushed RISC; that's how Linux became prominent; that's how Arduino became the most popular micro-con platform (despite more clever things being available).
You make the learning curve nice and gentle, and you draw into your ranks all the unwashed masses out there. In time, out of those ranks the next tech leaders will emerge.
I don't disagree, and I suggested as much to the Xilinx folks (well their EVP of marketing at the time) that if they just added $0.25 to the price per chip they could fund the entire tools effort with that 'tax' and since they would be 'giving away' the tools they could re-task all of the compliance guys who were insuring that licenses worked or didn't work into building useful features.
Their counter is of course that they have customers who sweat the $0.25 difference in price. (which I understand but $10,000 in tools and $15,000 in consulting a year is a hundred thousand chips. Which they say "oh at that volume we would wave the tooling cost." And that got me back to your point of "You already have their design win, why give them free tools? Why not give free tools who have yet to commit to your architecture?"
To me, the entire recent history of computer industry (well, all of it is recent BTW) shows that, if you want your technology to become mass-adopted, you need to make it easier for the little guy to get in the game. The high school kid tinkering with stuff in the parents' basement; the proverbial starving student. That's how x86 crushed RISC; that's how Linux became prominent; that's how Arduino became the most popular micro-con platform (despite more clever things being available).
You make the learning curve nice and gentle, and you draw into your ranks all the unwashed masses out there. In time, out of those ranks the next tech leaders will emerge.