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Promising "an appstore for the physical world," Amazon's just unveiled their new online market for products created using a 3-D Printer.
"Customization gives customers the power to remix their world," explains the co-founder of Mixee Labs (an Amazon partner), "and we want to change the way people shop online."
Amazon's ability to sell you things before they've even been built is currently limited mostly to novelties like iPhone cases, jewelry, and bobbleheads that look like you. But as one web page explains, you're also buying a chance to experience the beginning of mainstream 3D printing.
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Of course you can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. After a while you'd
run out of air to push against.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday July 30 2014, @04:41AM
A bit unclear how, do you care to elaborate?
Most of the time, your feeling will be quite right [wikipedia.org].
I tend to like this line of thought (wishful thinking to be more accurate) but I'm old enough to have a hunch this kind of thinking is not representative for the "consumer market" and it won't happen unless special circumstances exist - e.g. the whole is simply too expensive and/or has a limited niche to hope to sell another whole product only because a trivial part is defective (e.g. a car)
I still remember a chef/butcher knife my grandpa has had - a made in Solingen [germanysolingen.com] - it was passed over by his dad; the edge was no longer quite the original shape but the steel allowed it to stay sharp longer between one honing and the next one. Now, this kind of thinking about quality and/or long term usability is quite unusual today - because it is self-limiting in regards with sales: not a bad thing for environment/sustainability/what-not but very bad for the bottom-line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Popeidol on Wednesday July 30 2014, @07:28AM
In answer to the extra-profit-stream part:
As 3D printing becomes more mainstream, people are going to be printing parts for their older and unsupported devices. These days they may have to dispose of them and replace the whole thing, but if you can easily buy a $20 part? A decent percentage of the population will be keeping their devices for longer (to use a washing machine example again, the last one I threw away was about 20 years old. It worked fine, but the pins holding the lid on snapped and the dials cracked apart from age. If there was a cheap repair option that didn't involve hunting hopefully through junkyards I'd probably still be using it)
At some point, companies will notice this. They will initially crack down on it because it's hurting their New Model sales a bit as well as seriously cutting into the much smaller 'spare parts' sales they're doing. If this follows the same trajectory as other technology, this will not work at all. The first companies to break through and embrace 3D printing this will probably see a jump in sales from people who like cheap repairs, and the rest will reconsider their stance)
After they come to accept it, they have an additional bonus: Selling parts has zero ongoing costs for them. They can grab the CAD models for the last 20 years worth of products, convert them into a usable format, and throw them on Amazon. No inventory costs, no production runs, and therefore no point when selling parts becomes financially unviable. Every additional part printed is basically free money, so they're motivated to put up as big a back catalogue as possible. Amazon (or whoever) would charge similarly to how their cloud services work: set rates for resources and time taken, and maybe a small percentage of the profit on top of that. Everything else will go to the manufacturer. Prices will tend to be kept below the 'piracy point' of most people to maximise profit - so small parts might be going for $5 to $10. Just enough so that the convenience outweighs the trouble of going to The Printer Bay and downloading the right part number and hoping it's the right match.
So the additional profit stream isn't going to create boundless wealth for executives, it's a consolation prize. It answers the question of 'if people are going to 3D print parts anyway, how can we maximise our benefit?'
(Bonus point: I'd expect smaller manufacturers to jump on board first; They can appear to be customer focussed while really just taking advantage of Amazon's much bigger distribution network.)
(Score: 2) by carguy on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:32PM
This could be good for you and me (and maybe a high % of Soylentils?), but in the general population I don't meet very many people who are interested in repairing things. What might have been called "Yankee ingenuity" is getting pretty scarce, at least in USA.