Re: On what the vendors MUST do!

From: B. J. Arnold-Feret (ppsltd@airmail.net)
Date: Sat Oct 30 1999 - 12:43:05 EEST


My hat is off to Bathsheba for stating what all business must have to go
through regarding technology. Not very many of the artistic oriented
business can afford the investment for a machine that is going to obsolete
quickly and costs so much to operate. Additionally, figuring the return on
investment for such equipment along with the capitalization for the business
itself means that your start-up should count on having to go for 5 years
without making any money at all. (This is conventional thought on
start-ups.)

In RP, there seems to be three markets. (The following is a very brief
summary...)

One is the high end market where users all have 3D CAD for design work and
use the RP product for design verification. These customers have the
ability to use the equipment as a verification tool prior to injection
molding, casting, or cutting. Another aspect of this type of customer is
that the customer has the potnetial to generate revenue either by doing RP
work directly or by minimizing other costs in the development cycle for
products. This is the market that most of the equipment manufacturers have
gone after.

In the middle of the market is the customers where the RP equipment is used
for refining manufacturing. One example is the mold makers shop for
injection molding. Most but not all of these customers have some type of
CAD system, but it may or may not be up to date and have the ability to
generate files useable for RP work. These customers look very carefully at
the investment of the equipment, and may not use the money for RP equipment,
in that the return and cost of the equipment are not revenue generating for
them.

At the lower end of the market is the customer that looks at RP as a wish
list item. Price is the overwhelming factor in selling to this market.

The equipment guys and the service bureaus have all gone after the top end
of the market, and as a result there has been competitive pressure to lower
prices with resulting market fall-out. But, the equipment pricing is prohib
itive to the other two markets. Therefore, it will probably take a
revolutionary to make all the RP equipment manufacturers rethink the market.

For an example, before Apple was Apple, the two founders worked at HP and
had approached HP with the idea for a personal computer. HP told them that
it would never fly. So, they ignored the common wisdom about the equipment
and launched Apple. Thsi was a system that could be easily learned and was
used by millions. It forced a wholesale change in the industry. Look at
Wang and look at 3D, you see some similiar market stances. I just hope the
3D looks at what happened to Wang and evaluates 3D market potentials and
direction.

BTW, before the Apple was a common item bought by home users, the industrial
market was the first and biggest user group. (As an example, Borg-Warner
had both PCs and Apples, back in the 80s. Each had different strengths.)
RP will probably have to do the same kind of step prior to going to the
masses.

IMHO.

B. J. Arnold-Feret
ppsltd@airmail.net

For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:53:14 EEST