In “Ozma of Oz”, L. Frank Baum’s follow up to The Wizard of Oz, he introduced a clockwork man name Tik-Tok. Tik-Tok had separate windings for thought, action, and speech.
When I heard this morning that Ultimaker and Makerbot are merging, I had to slap my hand away from my own “sarcasm” winding. Ooh, I wanted to crank that sucker up and then lean into this announcement. “Well, there goes another pillar of 3D printing, being absorbed into the Stratasys collective. First they wrecked Thingiverse, now they’re going to dismantle Cura. There goes the neighborhood.”
But, I decided to dig into this a bit further and maybe there could be a silver lining in this announcement.
Of course a lot of the home market is tied to Ultimaker, particularly their slicer Cura. It’s the backbone of most inexpensive home 3D printers, and if Stratasys does to Ultimaker what it did to Makerbot, it could be bad news for everyone.
For those who maybe don’t know the history behind this, let’s go back to the beginning: 3D Printing was invented in the 70s, and one of the companies formed at the start of 3D printing was Stratasys. They relied on patent control to produce industrial 3D printing machines sold to a high end market. When those patents expired, the RepRap project brought the designs for 3D printers to the public. Makerbot was founded in 2009, took the idea of the RepRap project, and quickly became the household name in 3D printers. They were still a lot more expensive than they are today, but they were making home 3D printing a reality. Ultimaker shows up 3 years later as a competitor to Makerbot with a fully assembled printer that found space in the home and education markets. Both of these companies were founded by people who were passionate about the open source movement, the idea that their work and designs should be made available to the public, so that others can innovate on their development, and in turn, that they could integrate the communities ideas into their own next round of development. As a result both of these companies saw their designs and software copied by others, iterated, and often returned to them with benefits.
But things started to change for Makerbot in last 2012, as Makerbot released a new 3D printer, the Replicator 2, but refused to release the source for it. By 2013 it was clear why when Stratasys bought up Makerbot. Since that time Makerbot went from being a champion of open source and maker of home 3D printer to “Stratasys, but more affordable”.
Now, the truth is, Ultimaker hasn’t really been producing 3D printers for the home market for 5 years now. It’s just not feasable to try to compete cheap printers from China. Even if your machine is vastly easier to use, and more reliable, it’s tough to counter “yeah, but that one’s $200”. It would require Olympic level marketing gymnastics to change people’s minds that your machine is worth the extra cost. So in a lot of ways, this isn’t going to effect the hardware market at all. In fact, that might have motivated this buyout. It’s no secret that Ultimaker was nipping at the heels of Stratasys by moving into the same market. So instead of trying to beat them, they joined them. And this could be good for both. Two struggling companies joining forces. This could be good for them.
However, as mentioned before, Cura is the backbone of many cheaper 3D printers, and if Ultimaker stops development on it… well, actually nothing major will happen. Because even the latest version, Cura 5, is open source, meaning even if Ultimaker stops development on it, people will be using it’s code base for their slicers for years to come. So this won’t really effect the software side either, except that any active development would need to be spearheaded by someone in the community, if it came to that.
We don’t know what Stratasys/Makerbot’s plan for Ultimaker is. The press release is heavy on marketing slang and thin on details. What we do know is Stratasys will get a minority share. We also know that buying Makerbot was a valuable and expensive lesson for Stratasys. Hopefully this time they’ll try something different. One possibility here is that Stratasys is going to take their floundering attempts at reaching the home/prosumer market, and hand them to the Ultimaker team to try to actually make something of the legacy they bought when they acquired the Makerbot name. They could even take the Ultimaker team, who are passionate about the home and open source community and have them actually fix Thingiverse! Wouldn’t that be amazing?! Or they could just add
Again, we don’t know. There is no word, publicly or in rumor, what Stratasys wants from this deal. We know that they’ve had a tough lesson from acquiring Makerbot, but what did they learn from it? We know that neither of these companies want to go head to head against China’s production, but maybe now they could.
And we know, above all, that change is constant. This isn’t going to end home 3D printing. It might even be good for it. And even if it isn’t, it won’t be bad.
Good luck, Ultimaker, Makerbot, and Stratasys, and God’s speed! Let’s make the world a better place.
