People need mainline kernel support and regular refreshes to reliably build projects based on it. This will require some level of building their BSPs in open and providing APIs for people to take advantage of the QCOM specific features. A QCOM that won't talk to anyone without an NDA cannot adapt to this.
What actually happened was that our management very quickly started telling the people who came along with the acquisition that they were doing everything wrong. The salespeople were selling wrong, the marketing people were marketing wrong, the customer support people were supporting customers wrong. Everything that the company we acquired did differently was seen as a problem.
Within about a year, anyone they hadn't pressured to adopt our practices had left and been replaced with a transplant from the Mothership. Another year later, the customers we picked up in the acquisition were rapidly leaving for other vendors. They simply couldn't work with us in a way that worked for their business anymore. Last I heard, pretty much the only remaining vestiges of the company we acquired were trademarks, and we were back to only having very large customers.
For this, Qualcomm does not have to buy Arduino for a big amount of money: Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and save the acquisition cost.
Addendum: For the acquisition cost, Qualcomm could do a lot of marketing of their offering towards makers.
No they can't. That's like suggesting "the aircraft carrier could simply turn around." The cheap and simple way for a multi-billion-dollar secretive semiconductor manufacturing behemoth that doesn't know how to write a contract for less than a million dollars or to publish documents for the public is not to just change that. It's to write a contract for millions of dollars to buy someone else that can already do that.
You picked an unfortunate analogy.
More importantly, if Qualcomm management is just unable to do this, why would they suddenly be able to do this with a different brand under their umbrella?
Pretty sure it can turn 180 degrees fairly quickly.
Evasive maneuvers are a thing
That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space.
Other than that, Broadcom never really had any community involvement, nor any involvement in the Raspberry Pi Foundation that runs it. However, some broadcom engineers were part of the foundation, which isn't quite the same.
I wouldn't minimise the effect of people just googling around and finding the name Arduino all over the place. It would be very hard for an entirely new platform to get critical mass while esp32 is not standing still.
What I expect short term is what happened to Eagle in the PCB space when Autodesk bought it (best thing that happened to kicad).
Longterm Arduino goes into the periphery of the maker market, similarly to beaglebone.
Plus the market you're implying exists is so small as to be utterly worthless to Qualcomm. They are in no way interested in individuals or small businesses
I'll believe it when I see it
