Comments on: MakerBot Math http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2010/01/makerbot-math/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=makerbot-math Putting the "Custom" Back In Customer Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:39:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Erik de Bruijn http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2010/01/makerbot-math/comment-page-1/#comment-2640 Erik de Bruijn Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:48:29 +0000 http://replicatorinc.com/blog/?p=1568#comment-2640 Thanks for this post! I was hesitant to publish these numbers because I was afraid it would get Makerbot into trouble (and I'm very happy with their success). But since Zach is publicly showing us the figures now, I guess it's fine. Funny thing is, when you were writing this, I was giving a guest lecture with the main question “What would Scott Crump do?”. This was among business students, and although they were not fully aware of open source and patenting specifics, they generally agreed that Scott could encourage RepRap for R&D input (who are experimenting more radically, they focus more on reliability and incremental, dimension of merit improvements). They could hire from this community (free-lance or contract). Also, they suggested they could try to sell an even cheaper unit similar to the Makerbot. Personally, I think they should at least partly open up their existing product lines so that they encourage and facilitate experimentation by their customers. Their users are an important source for more radical innovation (see the “Lead user” literature).

I think unit sales are the most interesting, perhaps even more the unit sales rate (4.2/day and rising for Makerbot vs. 5.5/day steady for Stratasys). If you include BitsFromBytes, Stratasys was beaten by open source 3D printers in unit sales last year. Not to mention that the Makerbot batches always sell out, suggesting that there's a bigger demand than what they can currently produce. This is an indication that for this unpenetrated segment they are not close to a market saturation point. So you can safely expect it to speed up.

]]> By: Ed Grenda http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2010/01/makerbot-math/comment-page-1/#comment-2601 Ed Grenda Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:09:22 +0000 http://replicatorinc.com/blog/?p=1568#comment-2601 The most interesting number to me is their unit volume. After less than a year, Makerbot is pretty close to parity with the market leader Stratasys. And they're not the only ones attacking with a machine based on RepRap. There are a number of suppliers, including Bits From Bytes (UK) and its distributors, as well as discrete parts and sub-systems suppliers. There are also a substantial number of kits being sold based on the Fab@Home work. See this page on our site:

http://home.att.net/~castleisland/comp_lks.htm

If you added all those unit sales together it might be an even more interesting number. Some of these hobbyist machines will certainly cannibalize the bigger players' sales, but it could also work in their favor by offering a platform for experimentation and apatite-whetting.

The extruder-based open-source guys are roughly where Stratasys was in 1997 with respect to performance. It will be interesting to see if open-source can progress technically beyond the point where patents have run out, especially in the US which is more restrictive – or whether they'll march in place while they wait.

Stay tuned…

]]>