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Intel Exits the Maker Movement (hackaday.com)
Reader szczys writes: Intel just killed off its last "maker movement" hardware offering without fanfare by quietly releasing a Product Change Notification PDF. The Arduino 101 is halting production on September 17th. This microcontroller board is built around the Intel Curie module around which Intel bankrolled a television series called America's Greatest Makers. News on the end of life for the Arduino 101 board follows the recent cancellations of their Joule, Galileo, and Edison boards. This is the entirety of Intel's maker offerings and seems to signal their exit from entry-level embedded hardware.
Intel likes to jump into a space and throw resources at a problem hoping to out-compete the industry leader(s). I can't remember a successful effort with that strategy though.
Intel has had several successes. In the non-CPU product line the Network Products group (not switches) has done pretty well.
They have also had a pretty good lasting impact on industry initiatives that they sponsored, like PCI. DPDK looks like it is getting lots of traction for something that used to be just a Intel proprietary download. Also look at any community forum like those from IEEE or IETF. You see lots of intel.com engineers contributions there.
I am all in favor of them using their considerable resources to incubate technologies and products. The moral of the story which is hard for some people to learn is do not assume that it is going to be successful or that it is even going to continue just because Intel is behind it now.
"Blue pills" are tiny ARM powered boards with microcontroller from ST Micro. They generally cost about $2-3 US dollars from China. Quite powerful and fully open. Big community built up around them. They are called "blue pills" because of the color of the circuit board.