Doesn’t surprise me one bit. They are likely moving onto scaled production with robotic manufacturing.
From all the meetings I’ve been I’m with stratasys over the last year they almost refuse to talk about makerbot. Like they are embarrassed of it.
I’m betting they didn’t lay off the people who decided to discontinue their already top of the market expensive 1kg spools of filament in favor of their “large” size spool which is actually 10% smaller, yet kept the price exactly the same.
The people that buy one of their fifth generation printers probably do because it’d be a pain in the ass to use a standard sized spool.
I will admit that I really like the color of their khaki filament and haven’t found a decent alternate source for it yet. I use it to print things that will blend in with natural finished wood.
And : http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/04/makerbot-lays-off-20-percent-of-its-staff/ as well. They will also close all three of their stores.
My guess is that they don’t have enough ‘pro’ in the prosumer line relative to what is available for a lot less.
The only surprise is why they didn’t do this earlier or closer to the buy out. Makerbot revenues are reported to be 2/3 of all of last year in the first quarter of this year alone. That’s still a good growth rate. The issue is with duplication of jobs between Makerbot and Stratsys, quality and being able to ship enough units in the first place.
It’s likely to become lower end Stratasys machines with proprietary material basically a Stratasys with a Makerbot badge. By and large the people buying Makerbot are general consumers and not part of communities like this on the Web. In a year or two Makerbot will exist as a brand only for Stratasys and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they moved manufacturing out of Brooklyn and back to the HQ in MN.