MakerBot lays off 30% of its staff as company’s scope narrows | Hacker News Reader

MakerBot lays off 30% of its staff as company’s scope narrows

techcrunch.com

27 pointsmsabalau9 comments

3d printer bubble continuing to slowly convert itself into a large pile of plastic spaghetti.

There are still some people who haven't heard that they aren't terribly useful in the end, unless you are the kind of people who like to make things, tinker, etc and have a vague idea of making prototypes and so on.

Once the normal human has printed his third Yoda's head the interests vanes pretty quickly...

Disclaimer: I built a few printers myself, worked for 3DS and spent man-months staring at plastic spaghetti.

Heh, great metaphor choice.

"Hey, after being acquired by an indifferent corporate overlord and destroying the quality of our products through aggressive cost-cutting, nobody's buying our shit!"

But it's been an incredible journey!

It's not entirely surprising. Makerbot has never been an amazing value, and as of the last few years, they've only decreased in quality and increased prices. Oh well. Good thing plenty of other players are finally entering the market to replace them (hopefully for good!).

> they've only decreased in quality and increased prices.

Hey, at least they made up for it by backing out of their open IP promises!

I've not been paying attention to 3D printing for quite a while now. Which companies are ruling the roost of desktop 3D printing these days?

FormLabs if you have the cash and don't care too much about the strength of your parts; their laser/light resin system is amazingly accurate. Otherwise, you're often best served by buying a cheap-ish commodity printer (the one from Monoprice is surprisingly pretty good) and repairing or replacing it (to the tune of 400-500 dollars for a replacement). Unless you need both strength and super high print quality, the cheap printers are getting to be plenty good enough these days.

Good thing they sold to stratasys when they did.

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