MakerBot Lays Off 20 Percent of Its Employees

Jason Koebler writes MakerBot fired roughly 20 percent of its staff Friday. Figures from 2014 placed the company's ranks at 500, meaning the cuts could equate to roughly 100 employees. The orders came from new CEO Jonathan Jaglom, Motherboard was told. Employees are apparently being led out of the company's Brooklyn office by security today. "It's about 20 percent of staff," a MakerBot representative, who asked not to be identified because she had not received approval to speak to the press, told Motherboard. "Everyone suspected that something would be coming with the new CEO, and that there would be restructuring coming."

Comments

they were pretty scummy.

[Lumpy]

They patented things that other people in the community designed and claimed them as their own. Makerbot may have been one of the first, but they ended up as scumbags.

Now there are a ton of other companies out there doing it better, Good luck to the new CEO, he's captain of a sinking ship.

Re:they were pretty scummy.

[Kagetsuki]

They also closed-sourced all the things they had open-sourced. I got one JUST before they did that and I've been not-so-happy with it ever since.

They betrayed "makers", open source, and their customers. They deserve a worse fate.

Re:Lets use correct terminology.

[Lead Butthead]

When you layoff 20%, it's just business (insert whatever reason that gives the top manglers bigger bonuses.) When you _FIRE_ 20%, it's big f_cking deal; a company has to be pretty screwed up to be firing 20% of its head count.

Peak 3d printer

[TWX]

Looks like we've hit peak 3d printer, at least as far as the near-term is concerned.

I'm wondering if this will be analagous to the daisy-wheel printer. For certain applications it's the best choice, but those are very few and far between, and are entirely based on fixed fonts and software made to do a standard set of rows and columns with fixed-width characters. They work great for printing multi-part forms and for where one wants text that's more readable than dot-matrix, but that's about it.

These first generation consumer-grade 3d printers are like that, but worse, because there's not much in the way of a business market compared to those paper printers. They were bought by businesses that specifically needed rapid prototyping, or they were bought by hobbyists that got into it as the latest craze. There's only so much of either, so once that small market is saturated there's less need for companies supplying whole printers.

Maybe if their sales guys would follow up...

[XxtraLarGe]

I called Makerbot to get an education price quote on a printer & materials to compare with other 3D printer manufacturers. I had to call back 4 times before the guy actually sent me a quote, and all I wanted was a printer & 10 spools of filament. He was supposed to send me some sample prints as well, and never did. Needless to say, Makerbot lost any consideration for what is going to be our first of several purchases.

Re:Lets use correct terminology.

[kencurry]

I was modding but your post needs commenting on:

There are two sides here. The "laid off" worker is still a human being, and it may be that he will have a better career and life ahead than those left behind. To be treated with total lack of dignity at such a moment leaves an indelible impression; I know because it happened to me once.

So, what I am saying is that karma is a bitch, to treat those you are letting go badly will come back on those who perpetrate it.