Most of the development team was NOT focused on FPGA.
Correct, but that was the "vision" of the tool, the hardware group (that I was in), and the future of the company.
The future was programmable logic, it was "modular" based design, then it was the IoT etc.
How many people are using those Altium features now?
Why do you think the board gave Nick the boot?
It wasn't because the company was doing great, the company and share price was in the toilet.
Go back and read the forums at the time, hardly anyone wanted the FPGA stuff, or the modular stuff, or the IoT, they just wanted to design their damn boards. To PCB designers it seemed as though all Altium cared about was this stuff.
So please dont rewrite history.
I'm not, it's a fact.
Are you going to deny the (in)famous "Turning the world of electronics design upside down" campaign when they made the PCB design tool
optional extra? All the basic package came with was FPGA and schematic. Altium was the laughing stock of the industry.
Are you going to deny that the company deliberately bundled the FPGA stuff with the basic PCB tool, even though hardly anyone used the FPGA tool?
Are you going to deny the final ridiculous move to China to be part of the IoT future?
Are you going to deny the company making the ridiculous acquisition of Morfik for 15% of the company stock? (that was ultimately Nick's downfall, unknown to him)
All this was part of the "vision".
Go read the forums over the years and you'll see what hard core users thought.
But granted, the "vision" also included everything integrated int the one tool. Genuinely useful stuff like 3D and MCAD integration etc.
This is not accurate and unfair to the guys that built all of the other capabilities that made it easy to displace PADS / OrCAD / Allegro / DX / Expedition.
No offence intended to the programmers involved in any of it, even the FPGA stuff, the FPGA stuff was actually very neat.
Of course Altium continued to slowly develop some other good core focused stuff, but that's beside the point.
Go read the yearly company reports and shareholder presentations and you'll see the clear focus.
It all failed, totally.
FPGA failed.
Hardware failed.
IoT failed.
Modular design? Basically failed as intended, although you can argue that some useful stuff came from it that some people use.
Again, I fed my family on those features and knew first hand where we started at the beginning of the sales process, what customers responded to, and felt perhaps more directly than anyone here the effects of where we ended up at the end of the competitive bake-off. -MB
Tell us how many customers actually used the FPGA tools in real world design?