I have been in 3D printing for over three years now and it has been gut-wrenching to watch Makerbot's actions. Like watching a crash test dummy, you can see the moves coming and it's beautiful and destructive at the same time.
Makerbot systematically SOLD their founding values. Open source, open community, independant, and made in america (new york).
These values appealed to the early adopters. And by taking large amounts of venture capital, Bre effectively decided to accelerate crossing the chasm by incrementally tossing each of these values aside as they were potential liabilities for mainstream adoption. He was maximizing shareholder value rather than catering to the customers of his products. Their patent strategy was clearly to increase their value to acquirers (Stratasys or 3D Systems). And by aiming so high on the acquisition negotiations they tanked the stock of every single industrial 3D printing company, who have all operated for decades longer than Makerbot.
I hope that Ultimaker and Printrbot stick to their values and gain significant market share. I'm not confident that Lulzbot's libre values will translate to a thriving marketshare and ecosystem.
One note on the article though... There is no way that Zach and Adam walked away with $100M each, where did that come from? I'm sure they must have been diluted significantly. If not, I'm very interested how that happened if anyone knows!
Made in America isn't really an important scaleable value. For American customers it plays on their patriotism. For overseas customers it plays on the perceived quality of American products. In both cases, it's just marketing trickery to make people like them.
The trickery is based on the apparent politics. The question is whether the incentive was honest or not.
In reallity I'd guess that outsourcing is only really viable when the production volume is big enough and if the knowledge to select the right process is there. Homebrew is educative and saves a lot of money if the work hours can be deducted or counted as training, fun or early investment.
One nit: management weren't maximising shareholder value -- Makerbot seems to be tunneling into the ground.
Rather they were actively strip-mining all possible value and cash flow from a rapidly decomposing corpse.
The question remains whether or not 3D printing is itself a viable long-term business. Robert Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Wealth points to it as among the few bright spots, and I'm reminded strongly of Cory Doctorow's Makers. But ultimately these devices are almost certain to be built by existing (or newly emerged) large toolmakers.
I still see the primary value as being rapid prototyping. Once you've got the design you want, it's really hard to beat production-at-scale economics.
As for shakeout -- the US auto industry ballooned then consolidated massively in its early days. Yes, if you'd bet on GM you would have won big (through the 1960s), but if you'd bet on any of numerous other firms, you'd have lost everything.
I have cupcake #40 with the wooden pulleys for belts. It was an incredibly fun project, assembling, soldering, general fuzing around to keep the thing working. It requires probably 2 hours of fiddling for each hour of printing. It felt momentous because it kind of was, me and perhaps a hundred other people toiling away, bringing the future to reality.
i'm sad to see the state they're in. I hope, dearly hope, that that spirit of the year or so i spent caring for my cupcake is how humanity ends up, at least for some of humanity. building kits, patching code, struggling with the odd issue. It really felt like pushing the frontier of the human experience. we can't all expand the frontier of theoretical knowledge, but we can all push a frontier. It's a lovely place to be.
Sitting in my basement week after week, heck, month after month trying to get a good sequence of prints, that was a great time in my life. I don't think much will come of 3d printing of abs plastic. Super customized shapes are just not that interesting. Perhaps VR will simplify the design process, which i kind of hated.
At the start, right at the beginning of makerbot, they were wonderful.
It was interesting to watch an open hardware company wrassle with profitability and scale vs. "being a good citizen". The two aren't mutually exclusive, though it seemed like Makerbot thought that was the case. Oh well. Goodbye Makerbot. Thanks for building upon the RepRap and for pushing 3d printing out into the mainstream. Sorry you abandoned your roots and got swallowed up into the megabusiness garbagescape.
The real problem is that MakerBot didn't keep up with the technology. Extruding hot ABS filament and hoping it would bond to the previous layer just isn't a very good technology. The Form1, Form2, and Ember, all stereolithography machines, produce much better parts. There are half a dozen extruder type printers better than the MakerBot, and some are cheaper.
One of the questions I have: what are 3D printers in this weight class being used for beyond novelty?
I like shiny tech as much as anybody here, and I'm certainly excited by the potential of 3D printing. But companies eventually have to survive on actual revenues. And for people who make tools, that generally means their customers have to use the tools to make money.
As an example, my brother makes custom wood furniture, so he buys saws and saw blades. As long as people want wood furniture for their homes, saw-makers get a slice of that. What are 3D printer makers getting a slice of to sustain their business?
I generally use mine to test fitment of parts that I'm going to machine. While 3d printing takes a while, hand machinging things on my manual mill takes a LOT longer and the material is more expensive. I made a mount for a motor for a skateboard with an irregular truck shape in about 8 prototypes with the 3d printer. Then I cut the metal part out in one go and it fit perfectly.
Also for custom brackets and enclosures they're great. You can make all sort of custom one off parts with a 3d printer and they're good for at LEAST mocking up a prototype if not even making a real working prototype.
Even more fun, I've got a project to convert my mill to a CNC, and round one of that is to 3d print the brackets, attach them and then cnc up the actual brackets from aluminum. Then replace them.
3d printers also let you do things like lost plastic casting, lost wax casting, etc.
But the fitment and layout thing is not to be ignored. When you're making parts that will go into real machines, it's really hard to get good measurements of the real part. Lets say I'm making a part that goes in a car. I can get lots of measurements by hand but I'll likely be off as it's kind of a free-hand thing. You can then cad up and print the part and then go shove it in there and see where you're off, measure those gaps, alter the cad, reprint... These parts are pretty cheap (generally less than $1 each for materials). Whereas having a dude in a shop cnc up a real one is quite expensive, running $100/hour machine time. The other benefit is you get to test placing your part into the machine. You can often make parts that work but you can't get them in to the machine without say taking THE WHOLE FRONT END OFF OF A CAR, which in itself could take 8 hours of mechanic time.
I've also got a bunch of misc things. I've got a flower vase my wife likes in black plastic that I sealed that just looks different. And I've got a bunch of coasters I cnc'd up that are custom that I use and I rally like. I also cnc'd up a custom kindle hard case for my son with his name and email on one side and a silouhette of Optimus on the other side. He loved it. Those things are just general crafting.
I've also learned CAD much better because design -> object is very quick so some weekends I'll just doodle in cad and then start the printer and start playing games while it does it's thing.
Then again the first 1/2 of my undergrad I was a Mech E, and I worked at a game studio for 3 years so I'm pretty fluent in 3d design compared to the average person. But if you can run around a map in a FPS once or twice you generally have enough 3d spacial awareness to do modelling. Computers make this much easier as you can rotate the object live which connects the dots in your brain that the old multiple view paper form was much harder to do.
I think it was spring of 2012 when I visited Manhattan to buy a 3D printer. I wanted to see one first hand and visited the store in (or around) Soho, and while the store had some great models printed and the staff were enthusiastic, they really didn't sell me on why I should buy one from Makerbot. I did see 3D printing first hand, and decided I would definitely get a printer. Coincidentally, I visited Hack Manhattan that night and a fellow (forgotten his name...) was building a beta PrintrBot Simple and explained why he thought Makerbot wasn't a good design, why Ultimaker is a much better product (extruder feed motor placement, speed, accuracy, and reliability) and finally, the most important, that no one buying their first 3D printer should be spending 2000 dollars. Get a PrintrBot kit, spend a few hundred bucks and upgrade when needed.
It was great advice. There are many design files on the Internet, but it was really CAD that I needed to learn. And in the meantime, there was so much to learn about printing: different materials, filament suppliers, how to deal with calibration, optimize slicing options, troubleshoot extrusion speeds, filament quality, and printing temperatures to name a few.
It's been nearly 4 years, the little PrintrBot Jr kit has been discontinued, but it still works well and I will probably upgrade this year. The technology and features available are far better today (OMG auto levelling beds) and I want a much larger printing area and faster printer.
Makerbot provided a brand for 3D printing, but also a promise that it was ready for consumers. They really weren't, and probably still aren't. Further, CAD and 3D modelling are not trivial skills to acquire. Regardless of the future of the company and their missteps, they did bring about massive consumer awareness of the technology.
I followed MakerBot pretty obsessively since its early days. I have to agree with some of the comments here. It was very clear after they raised venture money that they became a marketing machine. I suspect they were burning quite lot of money to grab marketshare and become the de facto personal 3D printer. They pawned that thing off at the right time and let it become someone else's problem. Classic venture playbook.
In addition, Stratasys is also not a consumer peripheral company. They primarily make software and printers for the industrial 3D manufacturing market. But making the mistake won't hurt them much; they're still well seated in the industry.
They also don't have to worry about losing MakerBot because 3D printing/additive manufacturing is going to be freaking insanely big. Companies want to shorten R&D time and generate new products quickly.
Also, 3D printers for the purpose of manufacturing products won't be big in the home anytime soon. Why? Except for the new HP Multi Jet Fusion printers which are a small step towards the end goal with their ability to use different agents within a single part, most 3D printers only have the capability to print in a single material at a time. This is great for parts, but not good for consumer goods which are made of many different materials. Today's 3D printer is very far away from a Star Trek replicator. There is a lot that goes into part design, determining how to best build the part, doing the design of the build which is different than the part specification so that parts can be built as designed, knowing how to use the printer along with maintaining/dealing with quirks caused by how the parts are built (which depends on technology/machine/material used and many other things), and removing structural supports and power/resin from parts after they are built.
Even when all of that becomes less complicated, and it will, home technology will almost always be behind the level of technology that exists in a company dedicated to manufacturing. Consumer 3D for most products is just not going to be a good market anytime soon.
The exception is food. Food is not nearly as complicated of a product as other consumer goods to make, and people love to make beautiful custom food at home, so 3D food printers could very easily become a staple in the kitchen. They could be every home within 40-50 years and in many food production facilities within 20 years.
I bought a "Replicator 2, Dual Extruder" with the Mark 7 extruders, it was the last fully open source printer they made. What I liked about it is that it is so open source its easy to fix. Its also rather poorly implemented in that the drive mechanisms fail, the nuts loosen, it didn't come with an enclosed build space etc etc. However it has been a solid platform for experimenting on. Playing with the BondTech extruder (much better than Makerbot) the E3D hotend (much better melt zone control) different driver architectures. I think if I was buying one fresh I'd probably get a Lulzbot for the same reason.
On the one hand its sad to see them die, on the other it created some very wealthy folks who might angel invest in new even cooler stuff. Circle of life.
My 9yo loved his 3-D printing spring break camp last week [0].
Any views on the Monoprice 3-D printers? [1] It seems hard to compete with Shapeways [2], if we're willing to wait a day for shipping. As with lots of technology, it's hard to buy a 3-D printer given how much they improve each year.
They used TinkerCAD at the camp. Should he stay with it or is there better online software for a beginner?
I've got the Monoprice Maker Select. You'll find it's a rebrand of the popular Wanhao Duplicator i3.
Shapeways printers are not really comparable to the cheap FDM printers. For example, they have Full Colour Sandstone as an option which just isn't possible on the Monoprice one as it will only do one color at a time.
I think the improvements in 3d printing aren't too huge like they are in other technologies. 3D printers can be upgraded too (with plenty of self-printed parts). For the popular Wanhao Duplicator i3, http://3dprinterwiki.info/wiki/wanhao-duplicator-i3/ .
Of course if you want something that just prints without having to do all these modifications/maintenance, you'll probably have to spend more on a printer.
Like every aspect of a business, the value of the brand and reputation is tracked as an asset, and is called “goodwill” in company reports. For every quarterly report Stratasys has released after the acquisition of MakerBot, a goodwill impairment charge – a markdown on the value of the MakerBot brand – has been recorded. Including the 2015 yearly report, Stratasys has taken a total goodwill impairment charge of nearly one Billion dollars for MakerBot. Keep in mind Stratasys acquired MakerBot for $403 Million in stock. Stratasys has written off nearly double the value it paid through the failures of the MakerBot brand.
How exactly does "goodwill impairment" work? A billion dollar tax writeoff?! This sounds like some kind of scam.
Goodwill is the value of intangible assets -- name recognition, customer relations, intellectual property, etc.
Impairment is a reduction in that stated asset due to overpayment, negative publicity harming relations, etc.
So by impairing the total paid, they are essentially saying what they paid for was worthless, and by impairing more than it is worth is saying it damaged their brand significantly in addition to being worthless.
It sounds like a difficult argument to make. Impairment on the total cost, maybe since the closing up the devices has made it last instead of first on most people's 3D-printers-to-get list. More than what they paid for it does seem like a scam -- I wonder if they have already justified it successfully? Does anyone know?
EDIT: I see skybrian's reply. Good catch. So the goodwill had increased in value temporarily and then decreased to essentially zero. Is that all of the goodwill of the whole stratasys company? Are they now saying "we have no IP/brand recognition/etc"? If so, that still sounds almost as sketchy for tax accounting as saying the MakerBot acquisition significantly damaged their own brand.
If you haven't seen it, you should watch "Print the Legend", a documentary about a few 3D printer startups like MakerBot, FormLabs, etc. It's on Netflix streaming: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80005444
I actually wrote this comment 2 days ago. It's interesting that HN corrects this to "2 hours ago" to fit the post timeline, which was also originally 2 days ago. Note, the original post didn't make it to the front page unlike now. Weird stuff.
Makerbot systematically SOLD their founding values. Open source, open community, independant, and made in america (new york).
These values appealed to the early adopters. And by taking large amounts of venture capital, Bre effectively decided to accelerate crossing the chasm by incrementally tossing each of these values aside as they were potential liabilities for mainstream adoption. He was maximizing shareholder value rather than catering to the customers of his products. Their patent strategy was clearly to increase their value to acquirers (Stratasys or 3D Systems). And by aiming so high on the acquisition negotiations they tanked the stock of every single industrial 3D printing company, who have all operated for decades longer than Makerbot.
I hope that Ultimaker and Printrbot stick to their values and gain significant market share. I'm not confident that Lulzbot's libre values will translate to a thriving marketshare and ecosystem.
One note on the article though... There is no way that Zach and Adam walked away with $100M each, where did that come from? I'm sure they must have been diluted significantly. If not, I'm very interested how that happened if anyone knows!