Thanks for your input Hippy but I would like to see an official response from Rev-Ed ... I personally would buy if I knew there was a reasonable life to the investment.
The PICAXE has been around for at least 5 years, maybe 6, and Rev-Ed have been in business since 1998 and probably longer, and seem to be going from strength to strength.
I am sure Rev-Ed would like to say they will be around for many more years to come, offering the same value for money services and continuing to build on the foundations they have, long into the next millennium.
Hopefully they will be, but, no matter what ones good intentions or designs, reality is not so easy to predict. Maybe Bath will be wiped away by a meteorite overnight, someone might make a buy-out offer too good to refuse. I'd be surprised if Rev-Ed were to say they did not plan to be around in a few years time, are bored of PICAXE or selling, or were collectively off to Katmandu to re-capture the essence of the 60's, but you never know.
I don't think that the PICAXE is a high risk at all for hobbyists, educationalists nor even for commercial users. In some ways a PICAXE investment has advantages over other products; at least being PICmicro-based any product can be fairly easily adapted to use a PICmicro. Of course, Microchip could go out of business first and take down Rev-Ed, although they could just as easily side-step that catastrophe.
The biggest risk I see with PICAXE is that technology is moving forward and things like DIP footprint and 5V devices are becoming rarer. In a few years time the whole product range may have changed, but I'd expect Rev-Ed to move with the times, put QFN and smaller chips on carrier boards for hobbyists and we'll just have to adapt to 3V3 or 1V6 technology as the rest of the world will. Maybe the entire hobby market will collapse because resistors only come in surface mount and are too small to see.
If Rev-Ed fold or change course and similar PICmicro's exist as today, then ( Rev-Ed should stop reading here ) it wouldn't be that hard to build a PICAXE clone and create a new Programming Editor, it's just software and more software. Someone can step in and fill the void. If I outlast Rev-Ed and still have my faculties it could be me
Sod's Law now predicts that Technical will post, "Rev-Ed will be closing permanently on Friday. Bye" ...