(no subject)

From: Rob Connelly (Becton Dickinson & Company)
Date: Monday, February 27, 1995

From: Rob Connelly (Becton Dickinson  & Company)
To: RP-ML
Date: Monday, February 27, 1995
Marshall Burns writes...
>     I disagree. How can a machine capable of generating a 3-D solid
>object directly from computer data be overpriced at anything less than a
>million dollars? Look at the productivity gains that manufacturers using
>these machines are realizing.

Marshall, wake up and smell the 5081!  One of the fundamentals of capitalism is 
that the marketplace determines the pricing level of products.  You are not nor 
have you ever been in the market for one of these machines.  Perhaps that is 
why you arbitrarily assigned "a million bucks" as the value of an RP machine.  
I'll bet that GM saves literally billions of dollars each year by using pencils 
and pens as opposed to chiseling into stone tablets, but they quite shrewdly 
pay considerably less for their writing instruments.  Once a technology becomes 
established as part of the way of doing business, competitors arise to fight 
for market share, and the technology becomes readily available to the 
marketplace, those savings that you mention become the norm rather than the 
exception.  This is very much like the present situation with RP.

>     Don't get me wrong. Prices of fabricators will come down over the
>years, and as they do the growth of our industry will mushroom. But the
>point I am making is that we don't have to wait for these low-priced
>machines to have economical autofab; we have it now! Another important
>point is that if we put too much pressure on the vendors to lower their
>prices, then we are not going to get the levels of R&D that we need in 
>order to see ongoing breakthroughs in the hardware, and it will be 
>difficult for the vendors to provide the levels of customer support that 
>we need in order to have a happy industry. 

Again, such are the realities of capitalism.  Sounds like you prefer regulation 
instead.  I like our system, but granted it can get tough at times.  Your 
comment here again is probably due to the fact that you aren't writing the 
checks for these things.

>     By the way, Ian, you point out that Hong Kong already has more
>fabricators per capita than the UK...

Hey, what are these autofab fabricator thingies you keep mentioning anyway?

Rob Connelly


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