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MakerBot Merging With Stratasys
MakerBot Industries, creators of the popular Thing-O-Matic and Replicator line of 3-D printers, is being acquired by Stratasys, a company that's been working on 3-D printing and production systems since 1989. '[Stratasys] facilitates the printing of prototypes, concepts, components, parts and more on an industrial scale and for commercial applications. ... Stratasys has demonstrated it’s going to be aggressive about owning the 3D printing space, and the MakerBot buy is the consumer-focused piece in that puzzle. For MakerBot, it gives the startup access to Stratasys’ wealth of industry experience.' According to the official news release, 'MakerBot will operate as a separate subsidiary of Stratasys, maintaining its own identity, products and go-to-market strategy.' MakerBot has sold 11,000 of its Replicator 2 devices in the past 9 months, accounting for half of all its 3-D printer sales since 2009.
Hey, it worked for Linksys.
Stratasys has some patents on 3D printing, so that might be relevant here. One of their more important patents is about making a 3D FDM printer (like the makerbot) with an enclosed build area. Nobody but stratasys is allowed to enclose the build area (existing printers normally have the build area open-air to avoid this patent). Obvious, yes, but nobody has bothered to challenge it yet.
Perhaps makerbot realized that if they wanted to continue to improve their product, they'd start running afoul of such patents, hence the merger?
That was the sound of venture capitalists making off with all the money.
I tink we're fog'etten about the DonBots' interest wit MakerBot.
He may hava problem wit 'dem and have Clamps for ova and hava chat.
I can't wait to see the shit storm on the reprap.org forums...
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
more about the stores, brand and Thingiverse than anything else, thought it does give them a great platform to litigate like crazy, all they have to do is threaten.. no one in the RepRap community has the money to defend... now. Makerbot was the biggest player with the most money. Now nothing.
Makerbot have been releasing more and more expensive machines, using more and more custom components (e.g. custom geared steppers) with less ability to repair, and more difficult to customise without replacing large portions of the machine. Stratasys are well known for charging massive amounts for basic feedstock, 'renting' printers (that you still need to buy for full-price), waving their patents on fairly basing things at anyone who wants to compete with them, and basically being massive asses.
So stay tuned for a new, even more expensive Makerbot, with minimal pretence to being DIY/self assembled (just plug it together!), feedstock purchased directly from them is some odd packing and diameter/cross-section (for superior quality!), etc.
This kind of acquisitions worry me, it reminds me of Microsoft buying competing companies just to close them. Hope I'm wrong but 3D printing is a really disruptive technology, current industry is worried about disappearing. So they are very interested in turning 3D printing into 3D printing services rather than owning a 3D printer. Anyway I'm backing the next 3D printer in kickstart
I bought a Thing-o-matic at the beginning of Bre's PR blitz a year and a half ago. I was excited about it. Then I needed more stuff from theIr store, and they were out of stock... for months... While Bre was still going on every talk show that would have him.
I began to think that this whole venture was just about Bre's self-aggrandizement and there was no follow through for the DIY product itself.
For sale: lightly used Replicator 2 with extruder and build plate upgrades, 3 months old. Or trade for any other 3d printer not controlled by thieving money-grubbing parent company..
Hopefully this will be a another arrow in Stratasys's quiver to slay the evil 3d systems (ok, not evil... But not as cool a stratasys).
Back in may 2012, more people used RepRap style printers than Makerbot-produced ones (even though Makerbots should, by all means, counts as RepRap-style, but let's not get into that). I'm not sure if the tables would've turned so much in one year. Perhaps they have. And yeah, I'm aware that RepRap might not count as part of the industry due to its DIY nature. But still, the article implies that most desktop 3D printers that people acquire/use are Makerbots and that just irks me.
I'd appreciate if you people had a gaze at http://surveys.peerproduction.net/2012/05/manufacturing-in-motion/3/, one page in a set of results from a survey back in may 2012. It may provide some useful insights.
While the dictionary defintion definitely allows for such use of the word "merge", I tend to think of "merge" as being an activity between entities of fairly similar sizes. I mean, it sounds odd to say that you "merged" with the hotdog you just ate, although technically that would be correct. Another example might be a small web start-up that was acquired by Google or Facebook.
For sale: lightly used Replicator 2 with extruder and build plate upgrades, 3 months old. Or trade for any other 3d printer not controlled by thieving money-grubbing parent company..
Just use your Replicator 2 to make one yourself!
who makes printers? hp? canon made the engines for hp printers.
the real battle will be software, and the rela patent fights will be software patents
The 3-d printing "revolution" is actually two revolutions. First, putting the ability to make stuff in the hands of ordinary people. Second, putting the ability to make 3-d printers in the hands of ordinary people. The first, the "making revolution", is still a work in progress, as anyone who's actually tried to use 3-d design and print software knows. The second, the "Von Neumann revolution", was never what Makerbot was about.
So long as StrataSys continues to make a low-cost FDM printer for home use, I think we can continue to progress toward the making revolution. And if they don't, the groups working toward the Von Neumann revolution (RepRap and others) can always fork off another MakerBot-style company.
In any case, MakerBot was doomed. 3d Systems' Cube was about to eat its lunch in the general retail market -- the Cube looks like something you'd buy at Best Buy rather than something your nerdy cousin built, and it's half the price. And I give it two years before the Chinese clones hit Wal-Mart, at a $400 price point.
Bre has abandoned the people who gave him his start. Sorry, but abandoning the first-gen "Cupcake" bot, 3 MONTHS after the next bot came out, and doing the same to the Thing-O-Matic folks, is a slap in the face to the open-source community who gave him his start. He's nothing other than a money-seeking whore, who betrayed his early supporters for the Almighty Buck. Even today's software updates, which have nothing different from the Whatzitplicator mark 1 and 2 other than a volumetric envelope setting, Makerbot Industries have abandoned the ones who gave them their start and turned into the entity that they pretended to not be part of. I wonder how many months before Bre adds some DRM crap to his supplies so you can only print stuff on Makerbot printers if you buy their own branded, DRM'd, overpriced filaments. And to think that I supported you, Bre. What an idiot I was. You seemed so sincere.
1. open source 3d printers are here and kickstarting every few months
2. shitty us patents are invalid in plaxes like slovenia, pakistan, india, mongolia
3. open source 3d print software is not stopping. it is growing.
4. fuck these corporate motherfuckers, they are against progress
"MakerBot will operate as a separate subsidiary of Stratasys," we all know how well statements like this end up.... MakerBot will be absorbed into Statasys and it will become a 100% commericial product.
This isn't the first time that a big player in 3DP has tried to get into the home/DIY printing market. 3D systems markets a Prusa Mendel with a slightly different frame build. I think it's sort of flattering that these heavy hitters in the biz are starting to buy up the DIY outfits. They wouldn't' do it just for patent protection, they have really good IP lawyers for that. I have a Solidoodle, and I think that their company truly embodies the DIY spirit still. In fact, the founder of Solidoodle actually defected from Makerbot to start the company. He was probably tired of making printers from laser-cut wood : ) To give you an example of how far this DIY scene has come; I have an older stratasys fdm 8000 at my office that our company uses to prototype orthopedic medical devices. Back when it was new, it cost over 60,000, and the material for it still costs about 250/spool. my Solidoodle is smaller, but it consistently prints more accurately than the big pro machine does. It also give me the ability to choose different "slicers", this tool pathing software is what is used to make the parts in the machine. there is very little difference in ease of use regarding the two machines. Sure, the Solidoodle can be finicky at times, but the Statasys does it on a more epic scale. I can clear a clogged nozzle in ten minutes on my SD2, but the big machine requires a full tear down to un jam everything. My SD only cost about 600.00 all in. The material is around 30.00 per 2kg. spool, and I have yet to see the end of the spool I bought with the machine six months ago. This is with printing almost everyday. Instead of driving 40 miles one way to the office to print, I can sit back at home and do most of my jobs on my own machine. The kids love it too! My boys are always asking me to print something for them. Sorry for the long post, but the FDM 3DP market will be here for awhile. It's cheap, easy, and thanks tot he culture that Makerbot started(and abandoned), there is a healthy archive of files you can print if you don't know how to create models in a 3D software. Peace out!
-Azuro.
...time for the community to take back the designs, the lead, the ideas and the execution!
Anyone who has been around 3D printers for more than a day knows that these things are absolutely not ready for the average consumer. What Stratasys did here was kept a competitor from advancing. If anything, this hurt the consumer. It was only a matter of time before Makerbot moved beyond these methods into the realm of professional printers, possibly offered at a reasonable price. This would have destroyed Stratasys.
Reprap style printers(the replicator is nothing more than a glorified reprap) are crude. Awesome, but crude none the less. There are no safeguards against bad prints, compensation for a bad layer, etc. The idea of printing PLA, or worse, ABS, through extrusion methods and market it to the average joe as having the same reliability as say, an HP paper printer, is hilarious. I highly doubt Stratasys will let Makerbot release anything remotely professional quality.
Good move on their part. But let's not get confused as to why it happened.