pic: Leveraging FIRST members?

[Greg Needel]

Originally Posted by tennispro9911

We shouldn't look at this as unGP. NI is not making any money selling us the controllers, but they are fostering relationships hopefully. It is the same thing as Autodesk giving us Inventor.

Not everything in the kit is free and in many cases FIRST buys components from companies at discounted rates. Without knowing the cost to NI to make the crio, and the cost of them to FIRST a statement about the money making objectives is all just speculation and will lead to nothing but arguments.

Also I think that Autodesk giving inventor is not quite a comparison. The financial investment for Autodesk is much less as the difference in cost between 1 and 10,000 copies of inventor is almost nil. Once the software is developed the cost of a dvd is almost none, where as NI has a physical cost of hardware and manufacturing is guaranteed to be higher.


As for the topic of this thread and the title of that session. It may seem like poor word choice to us, but who is the audience it is intended for? If they are NI sales reps, tech support, and NI users, They are talking about how they are increasing the userbase overnight. Even if the wording represents NI's true colors why should it matter? This might be one of the cases where the ends justify the means. Seriously, who cares if they "leverage" robotics users if we as a community get the benefits that a large cooperation can bring to the table.