Holy crap; this was 2 years ago. It’s funny to see how far they’ve come. They’re in freefall, they’ve closed their american factories and are moving them overseas, they’ve managed to go from one of the best to one of the worst reputations in the industry. I like to think we all helped make that happen.
To be fair, I think Stratasys made that happen. The makers love an underdog, a little guy. If Stratasys cared about the maker market at all, they could have had affordable printers in homes fifteen years ago. The only reason Stratasys bought Takerbot was to establish a consumer to professional vendor conveyor belt.
The Makerbot issues started well before the SSYS buyout.
I just checked out their site for the first time in a long time… I found this very humorous
https://store.makerbot.com/replicator
Apparently they liked the video Bre did so much they haven’t changed it… 2 CEOs later
@Taylor_Landry that video… nothing against Bre, but it seems like he’s on the verge of burping for every sentence he speaks.
How is their class action progressing I wonder… US Class Action against their “60hr (not so smart) replacable extruder”
It will be years before anything happens with that
@David_Bassetti The case is a securities fraud case, not specifically for the extruder. The suit claims that the company withheld critical information, part of which was the knowledge the extruders were having issues. The case isn’t about making the extruder issue right, it’s about the money the shareholders lost when SSYS wrote down most of the value of the purchase. The primary issue is paying too miuch for an over valued asset then taking such a beating they had to soon write it off. Regardless of any issues with the extruder the sales projections weren’t realistic leading them to pay far too much for the company.
@dstevens_lv
Nice… really nice… thanks for such a GREAT explanation. I did think 440 million was a bit much but then they got thingiverse so I assumed it was value for money.
It does make you wonder if SSYS wanted to disrupt the market for low cost printers by screwing up the market leader in that niche. But it probably was just management incompetence.
SSYS bought the growth rate and brand. They also absorbed one of their biggest potential competitors. On those levels, it wasn’t an unreasonable acquisition price at the time. The BIG problems at MBI – the stuff that obliterated their financial performance, not the tribal open source / closed source stuff that doesn’t matter to 95% of MBI’s target market – happened because SSYS utterly botched the buyout terms. They tied management’s stock payouts to 2014 sales targets. That meant Bre and Lawton would earn massive amounts of money by dumping incomplete and non-functional printers on the market, even though it burned the company to the ground. MBI management did exactly what their monetary incentives told them to do: focus on the short term to the exclusion of everything else.
All the shenanigans around launching prematurely, building thousands of units of hardware before there was working firmware, stuffing distribution channels with unsold printers and calling them sales, selling malfunctioning machines that they knew would be returned, and so on were deliberate actions to meet the short-sighted 2014 sales targets set by the SSYS merger terms.
What’s the difference? the one on the right is more reliable.
All I can say is I saw everything I needed about Makerbot watching printing the revolution on Netflix