This has been interesting to watch, from the Summer of 2007 when the Dicemelia was released (that was my first exposure to Arduino) until the 1.0 release today, its come a long way.<p>Perhaps one of the more interesting things for me is that the open source nature of the hardware has allowed a number of new businesses to flourish and grow and innovate. This lesson has been too often lost in the rent-seeking behavior of the 90's where 'owning the one toll booth on the road' was considered the height of success. We need to help companies see how creating an open infrastructure lifts all boats, and sure if you don't execute well you might get left behind but the whole market is grown much more quickly.<p>Also around 2008 I met with an executive at Plastic Logic (they were going to make an E-reader available in January of 2009). When he explained to me that they were building the screens (the thing they invented), writing the software, and designing the reader I knew that his company was already dead. I tried to explain it to him, the market was young, use your special sauce to develop expertise in the screen space selling to everyone, and once you're profitable expand into the space. But he wouldn't hear it, they had this killer tech that no one could touch and the only way to 'maximize company value' was to own everything from the reader design right up through the relationships with content providers. While I certainly could have been wrong, I knew that history was on my side. Sadly I wasn't wrong. They never produced a product (although they did take pre-orders once).<p>The Arduino was the exact opposite, anyone can make them, arduinio.cc providing a sort of architectural glue to keep them consistent and the message on track. Now, nearly five years later they have made Atmel the envy of every embedded processor vendor and have introduced perhaps hundreds of thousands of people to programming, computers, and technology. Way to dent the universe guys! I salute you.