Personally, I'm wondering how many on HN actually owned an Osborne machine.
I never owned one. But touched one when they were sold in shops.
What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
#12This seems like a normal result of post buyout restructuring by Stratasys. Does anyone have sales numbers to know if they are actually having issues?
This is what the business press is reporting, and it makes sense. The author of the article obviously has a grudge against MakerBot and decided to go postal against them when he read the layoff headlines without doing due diligence first. (Wait until he finds out they closed their retail stores!)
Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
#13Personally, I'm wondering how many on HN actually owned an Osborne machine.
Me. (Well, my Dad...)
I learnt _huge_ amount pretty much accidentally from that machine and the user manual that came with it. Nobody told me at 12 or 14 years old that kids weren't supposed to solder together a handful of parts to add a joystick to the parallel port and write Z80 assembler routines to speed up the inner loops of games written in basic.
Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
#14The Osborne effect whee announcing a future product before it is made way too early cancels sales of the current project. People forget when Osborne was losing sales, the IBM PC and PC-DOS was gaining sales and CP/M systems like those made by Osborne had a lot of competition. Microsoft/IBM had a converter program that could convert CP/M-80 programs to DOS programs. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/04/…
And Osbourne probably preannounced so early because of the competition (to pre-empt users switching). Preannouncement and failure were correlated due to a common cause.
OTOH MS vapourware has scuttled competitors. So it depends on your market power. Osbourne was against IBM and a disruptive tide.
Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
#15doomed is a strong word, and the article makes no attempt to argue that makerbot is doomed, but rather assumes it without any argument or demonstration at all. i have no stake in it myself, but if you're gonna make a strong statement like "doomed" you should back it up. layoffs != doomed
It wasn't just layoffs. "Stratasys also announced a $100 million write-down on Makerbot’s valuation in February."
Link: http://makezine.com/2015/04/17/makerbot-lays-off-100-employe...
But you have a point, they're not dead yet. They might turn the corner, hire again, and regain that $100 million in value someday.
Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
#16What I generally do is "I've got Rev C for sale. Source and schematics for Rev A remain available on my wiki, sources and schematics for Rev B now are available on the same wiki."
Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
#17The challenge of being an open source hardware manufacturer in the presence of an economy that is better suited to create hardware than you are (China in this case) is that you really have to execute well. I agree it was a huge mistake on Bre's part to leak the upcoming Rep 2. Without incoming orders you have to fund current orders and R&D out of cash on hand, and that doesn't work without a big line of credit.
But it is also really unfair to second guess someone who is riding a bucking bull in a nursery. That is what running a very successful startup can be like, lots of money coming in, decisions needing to be made with too little information, large outcome swings based on them with precious little runway to correct for errors. When you are in that space and someone reaches in and offers to lift you out, it can be hard to be rational about the choices you are making. It seemed to me that Stratasys knew exactly what they where doing, and less so for Bre and crew.
Unfortunately for Stratasys they failed to understand why Makerbot had been growing like it had, probably taking the late product launch as all the rationale they needed for a cash short company. I believe that had they understood what they had stepped in to, they would have approached it very differently and made very different choices. Not the least of which would be a mixed model of open and proprietary gizmos for their printers.
I am convinced that their lack of openness lead directly to the C.F. that is their "SmartStruder" which now has people calling for class action lawsuits.
A company with the Goodwill of a Printrbot and the resources of a Stratasys would have dominated the 3D market completely. Instead small printer companies are flourishing and kickstarters for new printers regularly cross $1M in pledges (and that is for printers no one has any right to believe can even be built!)
I found it hugely ironic that Bre is on the cover of this month's Popular Science [1]
Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
#18The MakerBot's problem is simply that low-end extruder-type 3D printers don't work very well.[1] They're easy to make, so there are lots of variations on that theme. TechShop has, over time, had one or two of all the major flavors. They're useful for making relatively thin parts, but anything taller than 3cm or so usually founders on the basic fact that ABS has too big of a coefficient of expansion to build something tall without delaminating due to thermal stress.
The frontier in 3D printing seems to be to get the cost down on the high-end processes, which are now very good. The Form1, the low-end stereolithography printer, is a nice little machine, and it's real. TechShop SF and Hacker Dojo in Mountain View both have one. Form1 charges $145/liter for the working fluid, so that's how they make their money.
Eventually, somebody is going to get low-cost laser sintering of metal powder figured out. But not quite yet. The Aurora Labs 3D metal printer turned out to cost about 10x the original $4000 price. MatterFab hasn't shipped their device. There's a low-end electroplating printer, but that's inherently a very slow process.
[1] http://gizmodo.com/why-3d-printing-is-overhyped-i-should-kno...
Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
#19I'm curious to see how 3D Robotics handles a similar situation. Their drone platform has been open source hardware plus open source software. There are Chinese companies cloning the hardware and selling it for much cheaper than 3D Robotics sells it for.
3D Robotics just raised $50M in a series C. It will be interesting to see how their commitment to openness holds up.
Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
#20 Gee, thanks, Bre. Again, why do you think that's true?
How did you come to that conclusion?
What do you know that those of us still in the "fantasy world" don't know?
Aha, that's it!
MakerBot fell victim to the Osborne effect, where talking openly about future products hurt the sale of their current products.
Sales dropped, so they got scared and went closed.
That sounds like a way more honest and real answer than the non-existence of an open source steel bender.