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Layoffs Reflect New Turbulence At High-Flying 3D Robotics (xconomy.com)
BVBigelow quotes a report from Xconomy: 3D Robotics, the drone maker that began life in Tijuana and San Diego, has been consolidating its operations after stumbling in its bid to go head-to-head against China's DJI, the world's biggest maker of consumer drones. In an interview with Xconomy, CEO Chris Anderson confirmed that 3DR has been reorganizing to focus its drone business on enterprise customers, but downplayed the significance of the high-flying robotic company's layoffs over the past six months.
Since obviously we live in the post-game-changed society now, with 3D printed houses everywhere and people downloading cars all the time, surely we are 3D printing drones at home too?
Consumer market is saturated with drones. Enterprise and commercial is where the growth wiill be.
Great company and tech.
They had a vibrant community around their products when they were open but since they came out with a new closed system they have basically been abandoned by the community. Good luck to them.
the laid-off smart watch employees and make a flying smart watch that you have to catch before wearing it. Exercise and conspicuous consumption in one deal!
His name and ability to sucker people into venture capital money is the only reason they exist.
They hired the guys who wrote ardupilot and promptly subverted it.
Their website sucks ass and stock indications are ALWAYS wrong.
Their customer service flat out lies to customers about items being in-stock or shipped.
Their DIY drones are sub par quality and way over priced. Their COTS drones are heavy, slow, and have short flight times (guess why).
Their good features, their flight management software and ArduPilot ... aren't theirs. They bought the ArduPilot guys, and the GOOD flight management software for ArduPilot doesn't even come from anyone at 3DR. The 3DR flight management software, while cross platform (the other software is Windows only :(), its slow, buggy, crashes, doesn't support all the features of the other system and is much more difficult to use which is impressive considering they tried to make it look and act the same.
They deserve to die, they do not deserve to suck venture capital out of anyone else.
Chris Anderson has no fucking clue what he's doing as far as running a company. He was a shitty editor in chief at wired and that is the ONLY REASON 3dr exists, because of wired and his name there. He is more than capable of making his bank account fatter, but as far as running a business, he's as worthless as a used douchebag.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Instead of going head-to-head against the biggest dude in the trade they should have done one of the following:
1. Become part of the biggest dude in town
or
2. If the thought of becoming a branch of a Chinese company is too distasteful, they could have look for partners outside China, and cooperate with those partners and come out with models that that Chinese company doesn't make (or not yet make)
or
3. Find a niche, a vertical niche that the Chinese company ignores
Instead of doing one of the above the went gung ho against the Goliath
They may be good in engineering, but they really sux at running a business
3DR started and became successful as a company focused on DIY UAVs. Recently, they've stopped selling most of their parts for Pixhawk-powered UAVs, reduced their financial support of the ArduPilot project, and introduced their Solo drone as a closed system. Unfortunately, many of the parts that were previously available for Pixhawks through 3DR are now only available through Chinese manufacturers with poor QC, which is inherently bad for flying metal objects. This has had a negative effect on the community that supported 3DR in the first place, and they can really only go downhill from here unless they make significant changes.
What we need is for the bankers who caused the 2008 meltdown to go to jail.