A lot of people wonder why large companies can't just stay in the US and compete on quality, and here is a great case for why. It doesn't matter how great your workers are, you can't sell a product for $3,000 when others are selling it for $600. Especially when it's a technology still in development.<p>And I know we pay extra for the warm and fuzzies knowing that something is made in the states, but I'm sure the home tinkerer in Indianapolis doesn't get super warm and fuzzy thinking of paying an extra $2000 just to support some exorbitant Brooklyn rent.
My crazy conspiracy theory is that Makerbot was acquired by Stratasys as a ploy to buy out the most dangerous and high quality big hobbyist 3D printer brand and then torpedo it with value engineering to allow them to sell their own in house brand (uPrint) better. Maybe that's not true, but the Gen 5 Replicator was Day 0 garbage.<p>My Replicator Gen 5 was not functional on launch, I never got a good print out of it. The self calibration function was non-functional out of the box after one print, and the inability to manually level was designed out from the Rep2, a design so good, international manufacturers copied it in the form of the Flashforge. The Rep 5 was completely redesigned for no reason, the integral filament reel was intended to bully you into buying Makerbot brand filament on their custom reels, the "new" software made it so you could CHANGE LESS SETTINGS, like you know, temperature, or feed rate. Basically Gen 5 was a corporate ball of dark patterns and poor regressive design, completely overpriced, and shipped before it was ready to boot. One could argue that making the Makerbot brand a more closed design was a choice of positioning, but I feel that is only justified if you can deliver the ease of use value, which Gen 5 didn't.<p>Sadly, those Brooklynite's jobs might have been doomed when the Stratasys logo first went up on the Makerbot sign.
Caveat Emptor. If you can't fork you aren't free.<p>The Makerbot rose up from a spirit of sharing and community goodwill, made money and employed local Brooklyites - so it was a flagship for the sharing economy and open hardware.<p>Now there is an impression that they closed it off. Make4rbot was bought by the holder of a patent for the sintering 3D printing technology, seen as an impediment to this useful methods community adoption.<p>The price paid for Makerbot was handsome, but as everyone was doing OK already - this was perceived as 'selling out' and the goodwill began evaporating. The question then for Makerbot is: Does the momentum of being first to market trump the anger among the maker community & alpha adopters ?<p>When I bought Minecraft at alpha, Mojang suggested it would become open - then after making more cash than anyone needs they sold it to Microsoft. I felt a bit betrayed, not because of $20 but because I promoted it and gave it to friends children and now they are tied into Microsoft which was the opposite of my intention.<p>This problem echoes down the ages: traditionally bands sell out the truefans when they sign with the majors; the closing of the UNIX community when Bell was privatised; the emerging idea that cool hacks, hardware & software shouldn't be shared among friends, exemplified by Gates letter to the Homebrew Computer Club about BASIC.<p>This makes new communities wonder if there is a way to prevent this - Stallman invented the GPL to stop the 'tradgedy of the commons' happening to his work & community.<p>Is there a community GPL that could have been used for MakerBot to ensure it stayed community orientated ?<p>Does this reflect the difference between Free and Open ? GPL & MIT, is this the tragedy of the commons that only the GPL ensures against ?
Totally understand being disappointed in MakerBot for a myriad of other reasons. But the whole, "omg stuff is going to be shitty because its Chinese" is a tired old trope. If you know what you are doing and aren't needlessly cutting corners you should be fine.<p>P.S: Not Chinese, I've just enjoyed enough Chinese mfg'd (even Chinese designed) products now to know that trope is old.
First the Closed Source discussions [1], and now completely outsourcing to China? What sets them apart from any other hardware company now?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakerBot_Industries#Closed_source_hardware" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakerBot_Industries#Closed_sou...</a>
Of course they are. It's been lies and flim flam for a while. Worst printers on the market, just look at the reviews. They had US manufacturing going for them, but I guess even that much of their previous reputation, honor, and pride was too much to hold on to.
MakerBot sucked at manufacturing. Laser-cut wood frames for a production product? Please. What they need from China is manufacturing expertise. People who can design injection molds and stamping dies. They were in love with their "replicator" fantasy of one-off manufacturing, forgetting that 3D printing costs orders of magnitude more than injection molding in quantity, and produces inferior plastic.
Moving to China means more communication effort and more coordination which can really hurt your business if you do it bad upfront. Same reason why enterprise usually hires consultants rather than hiring everyone as full-time under their paycheck even though the enterprise itself has to pay more money to the consulting company: enterprise doesn't need to pay for health benefit, bonus and even travel expense; pay a premium for a package. Of course, a smart enterprise talent management should turn consultants into full time over time if when the consultants are critical for the growth of a given project...
Understandable as to why they're doing this, but the amount of spin in how they titled their press release is sickening. "Production flexibility," indeed.
There are some comments here about the difficulty competing with Chinese knockoffs, but there are many small companies making high quality 3D printers, and they have good reputations: Ultimaker. Printrbot. E3D BigBox. Makergear. There are probably many others too that have been around for years but I'm not really plugged in.<p>Thomas Sanladerer on youtube is a good source of information, and reprap.org, if you're shopping.
Makerbot is in a tough spot. They lost points with people when they announced closing off of some of their work vs remaining open source. And so customers thought they might (if they are paying premium for consumer level printing anyway) to go with Ultimaker which retained premium build quality and remained open. And month after month, other companies keep bringing printers out to compete.<p>Microcenter is carrying Makerbot but also much lower priced generic 3D printers I think which are house branded. Dremel has a very nice 3D printer for a lot less than Makerbot and apparently has pretty good tech support too.<p>In regards to competing with China though, it's important to know that the products from China are artificially low and that <i>seems</i> to benefit us but it also means that so many of us are out of work or under employed. But if you straighten out trade balance and currency manipulation Chinese products become more expensive as they naturally should be, local U.S. goods become more accessible and less expensive to a degree and and we have more people with more buying power (because employment) to make the economy work.