Stratasys + HP = good news for 'jerks' like me
Jan 21, 2010 at 10:15 AM Jeffrey Matthias So Replicator isn't very excited about HP and Stratsys making nice nice and announcing that they're joining forces to bring 3D printing to a desktop near you. I gotta say that I'm more inclined to agree with Joris Peels over at Shapeways. I think this that is HUGE. 3D printing represents our chance to move away from a world of asian mass production where a product run has to be 50,000 or more just to justify the cost of the injection molds. It allows for on-the-fly customization and production quality one-offs. It is our future: as long as we don't let it get passed by.
HP gets into the coffee maker business
This technology is great. Anyone who sees something that has been 3D printed is impressed, sometimes even after they've heard how much it cost. It helps that, as an ambassader to 3D printing, I wear a printed stainless steel ring. That's technology that is beyond what people imagine is possible. Then I tell them it cost me less than $7 to have made. Great. Cool. Except that the costs need to keep coming down and there is only one way for that to happen: more 3D printers and more 3D printing. While 3D printed objects don't benefit from the efficiencies of scale, like mass-produced objects do, the printers do. They are made in a factory. The more that are made, the cheaper they are to make. The more that get sold, the cheaper they will become. I remember my families first Apple ][e computer. It cost something like $2500 in 1986. It didn't have enough RAM to be able to copy a floppy in one swap. My cell phone blows it away. This is because people kept buying computers.
Replicator points out that Desktop Factory gave the industry a little PR boost and then fizzled. This is supposedly the same effect that HP will have. Except that this isn't how it will go down. Raise your hand if you had heard of Desktop Factory before their big announcement. "Reading this blog is supposed to be passive," you say, "what's with making me raise my hand?" You and I both know you didn't have to, so quit complaining. In fact, you probably hadn't even heard of Desktop Factory until I just told you they existed and died. I won't make you actually move, so we'll assume you've heard of HP. HP has a huge customer base who up until two days ago hadn't heard of 3D printing. Now they have. Without doing anything more, the industry has already been affected by this partnership. There are now a lot more potential customers for 3D printing. Not just for the printers, but for services that do all the work. Done.
Another point on Replicator is that HP will become attracted to the technologies of Stratasys' competitors and the partnership won't last. Who cares if HP becomes fickle? Let every 3D printer company try to be her date to the ball. As long as there is a company as big as HP (and who needs to find a new niche as badly as HP does) pushing this stuff, everyone wins. Every company that sells 3D printers, whether they're getting the attention from HP or they're HP's most recent cast-off, will see more sales. Heck, HP may even make multiple arrangements (I'm not going to take the analogy there) with multiple companies for different technologies. All that matters is that the public knows what 3D printing is and that it is actually available to them. Everyone wins. In the comments on his post on Shapeways, Joris mentions that tomorrow he will compare this to the pizza industry. I will leave it to him to explain, but he's dead on. So check out his blog tomorrow (I'll add a link once he's written it) and this thought will be better developed.
So how does this work out well for 'jerks' like me. Well, hopefully we can use 'jerk' like it used to be used. You know, a soda jerk? That was a person who sold soda. I sell 3D design. I can deliver a file or an object. Either way, with a greater public knowledge of 3D printing and even with a proliferation of desktop printers, I will have more work designing things for people. So either I'll be a design jerk for selling designs or I'll be a jerk because I'll be in demand enough that I don't have to be nice. Either way, HP + Stratasys is awesome for me and other designers like me.
NOTE: I also see this as being HUGE for the open source 3D printer groups like Makerbot and RepRap. I also think that these companies are really where the desktop printer industry will grow from, but I'm an Open Design kind of guy.
Reader Comments (3)
Thanks for linking to my post Jeffrey. I am certainly enthusiastic about what the HP development could mean for the industry, but If I had to bet on whether HP is still in the 3D printing business 3 years from now I would be against it. Or if they are still in the business I would bet against them having made a major impact. Ramping up production can reduce costs, but where does the step function in savings occur? I think the 25X increase in sales that the Stratasys guys stated is insane. I love the comparisons to desktop printing and the Homebrew Computer Club, but they tend to be shallow. Mixing CMYK is many orders of magnitude simpler than dealing with the myriad of resins in contemporary product design. How many objects in your house are made of pure off white ABS? Anyway these are half formed thoughts, but I'm sticking to my depressing guns!
Well presented, and you make some good points! Good write-up, jerk.
Joseph,
First off, thanks for your response!
I certainly can't argue about whether or not HP will survive in the business, but I guess I don't care. Well, I hope for their sake that they do, but my point is that even if they walked out tomorrow, they have already doen the whole industry a service by drawing attention to it.
I absolutely agree that a 25X increase is very unlikely. That said, the sales are less relavant than the number of sales they gear up for. Once they spend money to build the facility to build the machines, there will be more available at lower cost. Since it sounds like they're talking about developing new printers using the existing tech, I assume this isn't too far off base. For a second generation of HP 3D printers to show up, however, we would need to see good sales on the first generation. By this time, though, I suggest that HP will have made a pretty big impact. We'll see. Obviously, I'm optimistic.
You have a good point about color and material variation as it affects the homebrew market, but I'll put forth one other idea. A lot of the things that I can find in my home are made of single colored plastic with some sort of paint on top of it to provide different colors. Perhaps some sort of surface coatings for color variation will do it. That is my half-baked thought in response to your half-baked thought.