New MakerBot CEO Explains Layoffs and the Company's New Vision

merbs sends an update on MakerBot, one of the most well known names in the 3D-printing industry. After its acquisition by Stratasys in 2013, defective parts plagued the company's printers in 2014. MakerBot co-founder and CEO Bre Pettis stepped down, and the company laid off 20% of its employees. The new CEO, Jonathan Jaglom, is now talking about how they're rebuilding MakerBot, and where we can expect it to go in the future. "The 39-year-old, Swiss-born Jaglom says that his priorities since taking over have been to dedicate more attention to customer support, to address the remaining fallout from the extruder problem, and to reorient the company to target its Replicators to the professional and educational markets."

Jaglom also envisions a sort of "iTunes for 3D printing," where people can easily buy designs online and print them out at home. He says, "I'll be sitting at home. Maybe something broke; maybe my glasses. Maybe I want to reprint it and I'll go to Oakley, Ray Ban, whatever, Philippe Starck in this case, download the file, pay $3.49 for it, and print it at home. And then you will have to go to your Kinko's or your Fab Labs, your local 3D printing, if you want it in metal or plastics you can't have at home."

Comments

Re:consumer alert

[gl4ss]

thanks to the internet though.. you can go online and look.

which is why Makerbot shut down their google groups support community group. this group provided people with answers for the previous (open source) models on how to make the machines work reliably and be top performing sub 8k$ home printers(extrusion problems plagued rep1&rep2 before community made printable fixes - fixes makerbot later adopted into their design and "fix pack" they would send to users).

with the 5th gen printers though, if you tried to mess with the smart extruder, that would void the warranty(supposedly) and users were stuck for weeks waiting for replacements and sometimes answers from their premium paid support mind you(you paid extra, like applecare, but got shitcare instead. in fact, it would be easy to argue that those paying extra in many cases did not get even the legally required warranty support(!)).

as a result they couldn't keep deleting posts just forever without starting to nuke so much stuff that people were starting to make threads to ask why are they deleting threads.. so one day they just froze it with the excuse that they preferred support to go just between makerbot and the user(they did not improve the user support at all though).

theres alternative communities now of course since, at places where they can't delete posts like they could in their own.

it's quite easy to spot a makerbot review where the reviewer never started the friggin bot even. a bunch of reviews done based on pictures. the 5th gen has a webcam, sure, yeah, that's a plus, but the firmware handling even that sucks big time AND it's equivalent to a camera . the 5th gen is also noisier and has worse output quality than replicator 2's(they went from replicator 2 to "replicator 5th" gen in one jump. for marketing reasons, to emphasize that it's a mature product. at the same time they changed the gantry -to a h-bot and not a corexy like any sane engineer would have done - , they changed the control board, they switched to their homebrew stepper controllers that suck big time, they completely redesigned the extruder and seemingly never tested it for more than an hour)...