I want to reply to your comment, however I notice your name includes the letters "m" and "x", which I find unaccountably suspicious. Please solve this increasingly annoying series of puzzles to prove to me you are not a bot, then I can confidently take the time to form and post a reply to you.
/s
Coincidentally, just yesterday I was sharing JWZ's piece on Google's RECAPTCHAs, and wondering at the sheer scale of it all. The numbers involved boggle the mind.
I know it's annoying, but I can certainly understand why they're becoming increasingly necessary in places. The amount of time I spend questioning whether or not the person I'm interacting with is real has increased at an alarming rate this last year. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that I engage with at least one fake person every single day now. Not automated system, per se, but a computer program actively attempting to pass itself off as human. Most recently, just a few hours ago with a fairly transparent catfishing attempt...
Anyhow, to say something relevant to the article--DigiKey also just launched a few other similar tools/utilities for custom antenna assemblies, sheet metal fab, schematic capture/diagramming, and PCB production. The latter involves what appears to be a competitive market of vendors, from whom you can select after you submit the requisite gerber files and get instant quotes from them all. That has a lot of potential, if executed well. DigiKey's record on such things is hit and miss, but I believe they have the capacity to make that into a credible threat to the current handful of dominant fabrication houses (your PCB's-Way and JLC's-PCB).
