This is a lecture that I’ve used in the past when teaching PowerPoint, to show my students how a PowerPoint presentation doesn’t necessarily need to be a list of bullet points to be engaging. So I put together this little presentation relating Makerbot’s relationship with the maker community to a high school drama and it amused me how well the analogy held up. Makers loved associating their name with Makerbot, like we were writing our name next to theirs in little hearts in the back of our trapper-keepers. And in the end they spurned us and, well, we acted like that love struck little girl would, impotent to do anything, but thrilling with every failure. And that’s just not healthy for us or them.
The truth is Makerbot has had their hard times and we’ve had some times too, and while we didn’t have those times together like we planned in home room, it’s time to accept that they’ve moved on and to move on ourself.
While uploading this video I found this interview with Nadav Goshen. The interviewer was brutal, trying to get him to blame someone, anyone, for Makerbot’s failure and to admit that they made mistakes, and with every reply it turned it to a positive and sidestepped the interviewers attempts to focus on the negative. Honestly, TechCrunch should be embarrassed with how their interviewer treated him, but Nadav did an excellent job. Of course, you don’t get to be CEO if you can’t talk your way out of a bad interview, but he won me over with that one.
I attempted, again, in this video to record it all in one take with all the elements in place and recorded live. You can see the slideshow on the screen behind me. But I messed up the outro so I had to load it in the editing software, and I’m glad I did because that’s when I noticed that the screen I was uploading wasn’t set to full screen, there was the browser window around them, and so I had to overlay the overlay with the pictures from the presentation. It’s a delicate dance to get it right in one take, especially with so many elements, but I’m gonna get it right one day.
