Should have spent less money on buildings and more on fixing bugs and coming up with good ideas.
Altium's problem has never been good ideas, they are leaders in that field. The problem is good ideas that people want and need in day to day use, and that will make a sensible return for them.
i.e They floated the company and spent every last cent of the shareholders money and the last 10 years on FPGA stuff thinking it was the future. The solution was great, but it wasn't practical on anything more than rudimentary designs and educational stuff. The market realised this long before Altium did, and they never bought into it. So it all was essentially a flop, and they never could cope with the support requirements anyway, just look at the lack of updates for new parts.
As for their foray into hardware (which was once again, a nice solution), you need look no further than the yearly reports to see how much they made from hardware.
And then of course they go into even wackier areas like the cloud and all this Morfik rubbish.
It will never make them a cent, it is suicide to spend time and resources on it.
Even the new Vault stuff, the usual story, nice concept, but only applicable to a small niche user base.
They seem to be doing small bug fix updates and adding libraries now and then but do you think there is any real development going on to help justify a subscription?
I am doing a flex/rigid board at the moment, support to do that properly with more flexible layer stack and layer specific board cut outs would actually be useful unlike 75% of what they added in the last release.
And therein lies the problem.
If they spent all their time and resources on the core tools (and priced it right), they would have the worlds best PCB tool that would own the beginner, low end professional, mid range professional, and a lot of the high end professional market too. The company would be worth a fortune.
But not so, the company is now essentially worthless, CADsoft Eagle is worth more than they are, because they were not content with simply being the best PCB tool, they went off on too may flights of fancy.
In the last 10 years, I'd say the only major advance they have made, and got right, that was usable to the general industry is the 3D component integration and modeling. Their 3D is the best in the business. Ok, maybe the FPGA pin swapping too works really well.
How much work have they done on improving other core stuff like proper signal integrity, fabrication (like your requirement), simulation
, and fixing long standing problems etc? The product speaks for itself.
Dave.
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