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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.
Yeah, but almost any serious printing requires a heated print area, even if only for the first layers. Otherwise things cool off too fast.
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.
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.