The MakerBot Obituary

Rather they were actively strip-mining all possible value and cash flow from a rapidly decomposing corpse.

The question remains whether or not 3D printing is itself a viable long-term business. Robert Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Wealth points to it as among the few bright spots, and I'm reminded strongly of Cory Doctorow's Makers. But ultimately these devices are almost certain to be built by existing (or newly emerged) large toolmakers.

I still see the primary value as being rapid prototyping. Once you've got the design you want, it's really hard to beat production-at-scale economics.

As for shakeout -- the US auto industry ballooned then consolidated massively in its early days. Yes, if you'd bet on GM you would have won big (through the 1960s), but if you'd bet on any of numerous other firms, you'd have lost everything.

Just like powder, sls, paste and every other form...they all have their uses.

Also for custom brackets and enclosures they're great. You can make all sort of custom one off parts with a 3d printer and they're good for at LEAST mocking up a prototype if not even making a real working prototype.

Even more fun, I've got a project to convert my mill to a CNC, and round one of that is to 3d print the brackets, attach them and then cnc up the actual brackets from aluminum. Then replace them.

3d printers also let you do things like lost plastic casting, lost wax casting, etc.

But the fitment and layout thing is not to be ignored. When you're making parts that will go into real machines, it's really hard to get good measurements of the real part. Lets say I'm making a part that goes in a car. I can get lots of measurements by hand but I'll likely be off as it's kind of a free-hand thing. You can then cad up and print the part and then go shove it in there and see where you're off, measure those gaps, alter the cad, reprint... These parts are pretty cheap (generally less than $1 each for materials). Whereas having a dude in a shop cnc up a real one is quite expensive, running $100/hour machine time. The other benefit is you get to test placing your part into the machine. You can often make parts that work but you can't get them in to the machine without say taking THE WHOLE FRONT END OFF OF A CAR, which in itself could take 8 hours of mechanic time.

I've also got a bunch of misc things. I've got a flower vase my wife likes in black plastic that I sealed that just looks different. And I've got a bunch of coasters I cnc'd up that are custom that I use and I rally like. I also cnc'd up a custom kindle hard case for my son with his name and email on one side and a silouhette of Optimus on the other side. He loved it. Those things are just general crafting.

I've also learned CAD much better because design -> object is very quick so some weekends I'll just doodle in cad and then start the printer and start playing games while it does it's thing.

Then again the first 1/2 of my undergrad I was a Mech E, and I worked at a game studio for 3 years so I'm pretty fluent in 3d design compared to the average person. But if you can run around a map in a FPS once or twice you generally have enough 3d spacial awareness to do modelling. Computers make this much easier as you can rotate the object live which connects the dots in your brain that the old multiple view paper form was much harder to do.

They also don't have to worry about losing MakerBot because 3D printing/additive manufacturing is going to be freaking insanely big. Companies want to shorten R&D time and generate new products quickly.

Also, 3D printers for the purpose of manufacturing products won't be big in the home anytime soon. Why? Except for the new HP Multi Jet Fusion printers which are a small step towards the end goal with their ability to use different agents within a single part, most 3D printers only have the capability to print in a single material at a time. This is great for parts, but not good for consumer goods which are made of many different materials. Today's 3D printer is very far away from a Star Trek replicator. There is a lot that goes into part design, determining how to best build the part, doing the design of the build which is different than the part specification so that parts can be built as designed, knowing how to use the printer along with maintaining/dealing with quirks caused by how the parts are built (which depends on technology/machine/material used and many other things), and removing structural supports and power/resin from parts after they are built.

Even when all of that becomes less complicated, and it will, home technology will almost always be behind the level of technology that exists in a company dedicated to manufacturing. Consumer 3D for most products is just not going to be a good market anytime soon.

The exception is food. Food is not nearly as complicated of a product as other consumer goods to make, and people love to make beautiful custom food at home, so 3D food printers could very easily become a staple in the kitchen. They could be every home within 40-50 years and in many food production facilities within 20 years.

Shapeways printers are not really comparable to the cheap FDM printers. For example, they have Full Colour Sandstone as an option which just isn't possible on the Monoprice one as it will only do one color at a time.

I think the improvements in 3d printing aren't too huge like they are in other technologies. 3D printers can be upgraded too (with plenty of self-printed parts). For the popular Wanhao Duplicator i3, http://3dprinterwiki.info/wiki/wanhao-duplicator-i3/ .

Of course if you want something that just prints without having to do all these modifications/maintenance, you'll probably have to spend more on a printer.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goodwill-impairment.asp

Goodwill is the value of intangible assets -- name recognition, customer relations, intellectual property, etc.

Impairment is a reduction in that stated asset due to overpayment, negative publicity harming relations, etc.

So by impairing the total paid, they are essentially saying what they paid for was worthless, and by impairing more than it is worth is saying it damaged their brand significantly in addition to being worthless.

It sounds like a difficult argument to make. Impairment on the total cost, maybe since the closing up the devices has made it last instead of first on most people's 3D-printers-to-get list. More than what they paid for it does seem like a scam -- I wonder if they have already justified it successfully? Does anyone know?

EDIT: I see skybrian's reply. Good catch. So the goodwill had increased in value temporarily and then decreased to essentially zero. Is that all of the goodwill of the whole stratasys company? Are they now saying "we have no IP/brand recognition/etc"? If so, that still sounds almost as sketchy for tax accounting as saying the MakerBot acquisition significantly damaged their own brand.

That quarter, Goodwill goes to 1.2 billion compared to 820 million a year before.

So if they wrote it all off, maybe it wasn't all for Makerbot?