If anything, seeing the printers in action made me realize just how inessential their product seemed from a layperson's point of view.
For all of the potential 3D printing has, at the moment it is a solution looking for a consumer problem, and most consumers aren't looking to make custom figurines or embossed text.
A few months ago, I walked by the storefront and it was totally empty. Apparently I wasn't the only one disillusioned by seeing their product up close.
That said, 3D printing is still pretty lame. Cheap plastic parts are rarely the critical element in a device. And even knobs etc often have retaining clips or friction-fit holes with sub-millimeter tolerances, that 3D printers cannot achieve.
However 95% of the time I'm printing something for a prototype or some little thing I'm tinkering with.
There are always going to be people who buy homebrewing apparatus - but their numbers will always pale in comparison to how many people just go to a pub or bar and buy a beer.
Of course, it's a matter of time before tech advancement fixes this problem, but today there's little reason to buy one of these machines if all you are planning to do is actually print useful stuff, rather than experiment with 3D printers as a hobby.
I've fixed our commercial (China quality) lasercutter using parts made on a cheap FDM 3d-printer. Fixed powertools like drills and drill-presses. Replaced parts on my bicycle. Made functional scissors, and a haircomb that I needed when no shop was open.
The issues are that for commodity items, in the first world, it is quicker to just buy them (if we don't have them already). They will also be prettier. Or if it is a custom item, one has to actually design&test, which is something that requires CAD skills and some hours of work. Teaching this will take some time.
Most people just watch kitten-videos and play Farmville using their Internet-enabled devices. Does not mean the devices are low-quality and cannot be used for useful things.
This way you can combine rapid iteration with high-quality production. When designing new parts, I often do up to 5 iterations a day. Sometimes engaging up 3x 500 USD printers at the same time, to keep iteration time down.
What makerbot, and Bre Pettis, did was truly awful. That was an absolute betrayal of trust to everybody who had been working on that project.
Good that makerbot is doing poorly.
It is only made more frustrating to people who advised them that this was the outcome at the end of their path if they chose to go this way, and they could not listen.
I find that sad.
If you're hiring full-time employees for short-term goals you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.
If it's just the 20% paycut, all your best talent is going to jump ship and you end up losing people anyway.
Those who are not willing to make the sacrifice probably don't really believe in the vision and thus probably aren't the right people to help you get out of the rut.
And one other caveat would be transparency. That way a company can't just arbitrarily request that their employees make sacrifices when it's not demonstrably essential.
Regardless, firing 20% will be probably make the best look around anyway.
These guys really did a mean thing to the maker community. Not only did they betray the trust of everybody that helped on that project, but it seemed like they wanted to take credit for 3D printing, as if capital M makerbot was THE THING that had suddenly made 3D printing explode.
No. It was the efforts of thousands of hackers all over the world collaborating that made 3D printing explode, and it wasn't fair to those people to see Bre's face all over the news, as if he had personally designed and built all of this stuff.
Time heals all wounds, obviously, and I hope there are good things for everybody involved with (or previously involved with) makerbot. But I hope that this is a lesson: being mean to people isn't cool, and they will turn on you and market against you when you do.
I suspect the market is saturated with such purchases.
Eventually someone's going to figure out exactly what they're perfect for and things will really go bananas. Until then they're fun but only useful to a pretty limited set of people.
I own a Printrbot Simple Metal, which is a nice machine. But the simple reality is that this is not a consumer machine:
- Given a choice between driving to town to buy a part, and firing up the printer, I'll drive.
- Given a choice between buying on Amazon, and firing up the printer, I'll buy on Amazon.
Where 3D printers are awesome is when I'm in "tinkering" mode—when I've taken out my toolbox and my calipers and my Arduino and I want to make something that doesn't exist yet. I can design a part using OpenSCAD, mess with the tolerances a bit, and run off two or three generations of prototypes in an afternoon. When I'm done, I can upload the schematic and some images, and other people can download it. It makes hardware almost as much fun as software.
But the reality—at least for machines using hot plastic—is that you need to learn about how plastic heats and cools, about what kinds of shapes are easy to print, and about how to model things using CAD software.
Until the open source laser sintering printers come down in price, the only "mass market" for 3D printing will be the kinds of people who have always hung out around RadioShack and Home Depot, or who browse SparkFun and Octopart regularly. 3D printers are awesome because they encourage hacking and entrepreneurialism, not because they give you a push-button desktop fab.
Not surprised things aren't going well. Seems like the vision died long before the sale.
The other day I attended a talk about the history of personal computers, and certainly it rhymes.
At the time everybody was saying, a personal computer? who wants this? People do not need a database for cooking, or a spreadsheet, it is a very expensive typing machine and it is very hard to use(command line). It was true.
What happened is that personal (and then mobile) computers evolved from a entrepise-centric to user-centric to grandma-could-use-facebook centric computers.
Most people in the old days could not imagine what the future would look like, because computer did exist, but their applications were different to what they predicted.
In the same way I believe 3d printing is amazing, not for what it is now, but what it will became.
I volunteered giving 3d classes for children and it is incredible what they could do after you teach them the basic concepts.
What is shocking for me is that it is "normal" for those 10 years old to design things that I could only do after studying engineering and gaining experience. Some of them absorb knowledge like an sponge.
I see in them the next Linux Towards, but instead of OSes, it becomes possible to design a car, or a plane over the Internet.Before 3d printers it is so hard that is practically impossible for normal people to do it.
I'm still bullish on the maker space. I saw a functioning prototype of this 3in1 machine in Pittsburgh last year.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boxzy/boxzy-rapid-chang...
CNC routing and laser cutting/etching included and priced much better. The maker machines will just get better and less expensive and I can't wait.
