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Comment by akavel | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, old wisdom creeps in: "if you really want something done well, do it yourself". But on the other hand, if they happened to fail selling at raspberrypi.com, everyone and his dog would be accusing them of hubris and suggesting they should have relied on "verified distributors".

The only thing I'm a bit sad about, is that probably the distro companies will evade any consequences. And even if they didn't, it would probably hit some random guys and not anyone really responsible for the incompetency.

Edit: I think I would feel some evil (bad, bad me!) satisfaction if R-Pi Foundation would punish the distro corps by not letting them distribute any further batches of R-Pi for as long as possible. But again, that would probably hurt most the common employees, not the management.

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One picks their partners. It's certainly not the first time things have gone badly wrong when picking a partner, and you'd think that as a bunch of techies they might have seen this coming.

It's clear they chose their partners based on their manufacturing chops, rather than their retail chops. To be fair, RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities.

Arguably what Raspberry Pi could/should have done was use Arduino's model of having licensed manufacturers and they could have sat in front of it, and, as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread, just ship giant boxes to Amazon to actually do all the dirty work. This would have covered the US, Europe and Japan (if you ship to all Amazon's fulfillment centers), which would have been plenty I think.

They're both part of large international companies. This first shipment is disappointing to many people. Hopefully crashing the servers so hard will give both these distributors some idea of what the demand is, and they'll get some large production runs going, and shift some stock to international distribution partners.

> RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities.

RS is where you go when you have an account and need small amounts of components on a regular basis. Buying large quantities of components results in a very frustrating experience.

See, for example, the way they sell surface mount components. Buy qty 500 of 0805 SM resistors and Farnell will send you a strip of 500 while RS will sell you 50 little strips of 10 per strip. Or the way that individual parts are bagged.

My guess is that the current batch will stay exclusive to the current distributors, but this mess will encourage the Foundation to add new distributors for all future product.

So the distributors will have some consequences: a smaller share of future orders.

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