Some suggestions for Espressif as a company

[PaulNi]

Hi everybody,

This is a follow up to https://www.esp32.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10713

First point, I'm very glad that Espressif keeps the model line small.

It gives you a lot of advantage over companies pushing a lot of niche solutions each with own hardware and software stack, design rules, and etc.

Any MCU developer is familiar with situation of him having to deal with 10+ compiler suites, development environments, SDKs for MCUs of a single vendor. Things on hardware side an be quite dire too. Some MCU companies, for example, disregard pin compatibility even in between major revisions of the same MCU, when there are no technical reason for making a change.

It will be very nice if you can keep things this way in the future.

It seems your success didn't go unnoticed

You seem to be getting competition. I heard of 3 newcomers to WiFi MCU market: rockchip, redpine, winner micro, morsemicro, Ambiq (rumoured to be making a wifi MCU as well), and one more whose name I forgot from America.

From my experience working with your product, I can tell Espressif is a great engineering company, but you are still so remote from end users, and industries. This will surely be used by competition.

Your competitors on this side of pacific, while not being nearly as advanced on technical side, are so so much ahead with reaching industries and end users. The whole field this new "IoT industry" is ripening very fast, and companies are racing to capture as much "newcomer" clients as possible before the opportunity window closes. We feel it too, despite being a quite established engineering company. We never had so much new clients who are complete outsiders to electronics industry coming to us as these days.

And yep, you have to ramp up marketing. You American competitors jam just every electronics engineering journal, website, and popular tech blogs. In comparison, Espressif feels being almost purposefully secretive.

Solutions

I hate to say the phrase "solutions company," but I think Espressif has to put forward at least some formally defined "solutions" (turnkey projects/product), and think of creating a company arm for doing them, or think of teaming with somebody else to handle it.

Recently I was in talks with few guys from Dubai who were thinking of starting a commercial LORA network for their own use (LED displays) and option to lease airtime to others. They were completely dumbfounded by absence of anybody who can walk them through the process even for a very solid fee they were proposing.

Importance of reference designs

While you should keep your focus on technical perfection of your products as a number 1 priority. You should at least peek at what you customers are doing with ESP and think of improving ESP with respect to end markets.

You probably already feel by yourself that you are in a very different market from generic MCU makers, and you have the most of greenfield opportunity working on products that were never done by anybody before.

Take a look at what your customers do, and think of if what they do can be made into a reference design. Availability of reference designs is always a huge selling point, and not only for generic products.

Remember how optical mouses came to being: once they were an expensive gimmick product, but the moment some Taiwanese fabless made the first reference design for motion recognition on the chip (there were optical mices with recognition being ran at PC), and companies no longer needed to RnD their own designs each time, the market exploded.

[WiFive]

I heard of 3(5?) newcomers to WiFi MCU market: rockchip, redpine, winner micro, morsemicro, Ambiq

Rockchip has been "doing" a WiFi iot chip since 2015. Where is it?
Redpine makes nice multiprotocol chips and they perform well but are expensive.
Ambiq should do a halow chip.

Espressif has big advantage in customer feedback and implementation experience, but if the other guys are paying attention they can have success.

[PaulNi]

Rockchip has been "doing" a WiFi iot chip since 2015. Where is it?

RK2206 scheduled for release to direct buyers in Q3, or at least so was alleged.

http://bbs.16rd.com/citiao-xinpian-RK2206.html