You're making a good product, but by no means something unique and irreplaceable. And then you pull nonsense like this one. Why? Don't they understand that they're just shooting themselves in the foot?
You're making a good product, but by no means something unique and irreplaceable. And then you pull nonsense like this one. Why? Don't they understand that they're just shooting themselves in the foot?
Let's hope they notice that their foot now has a hole in it and is bleeding all over the place.
But overall, what number of future printers and other recurring revenue do they expect to sell to production workshops, corporate, or low-tech users or other users which might take what they are sold "no matter what"? This is not a new problem. Do you / do we know the distribution of customers between the more advanced customers that may care and switch and the ones that won't even hear of the thing.
See also, printers, PDF or photo editing software, operating systems, all the way to mainframes. Realistically, advanced fans are rarely a significant share of the profits. And that's a problem of course. And for some companies it absolutely does come back and hurt them (IBM's competition did in the end succeed, and linux runs on most servers.)
If anything, for 3D printers, the competition is already here - much easier for the people who care.
I bet there are plans for new firmware $-unlocked pay-to-play features, making the AMS "more compatible" with Bambu filament (or eventually only Bambu filament for the next round or two of printers) and facilitating a lot more paid transactions and model purchases on Makerworld and taking the customary 30% cut.
So even setting the ethics aside, it's not going to do any good.