From: Adrian Bowyer (A.Bowyer@bath.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Dec 30 2005 - 15:47:36 EET
Quoting Marshall Burns <ListMail@fabbers.com>:
> That's great! Thanks for doing that. I taught a course on
> digital manufacturing for the last two semesters at USC (www.POOFF.com
> <http://www.pooff.com/> ) and would you believe that 3D Systems, Z, and
> Stratasys all turned me down to generate student designs for the class? I
> even offered to cough up some of the lab fees from the course, but they just
> didn't want to mess with it. Talk about lacking vision! Can you imagine
> where the computer industry would be today if Apple hadn't launched the Mac
> with aggressive promotion in schools? We'd probably still be kissing IBM's
> butt for behemoth mainframes.
That's very interesting, and is symptomatic of the RP (sorry) industry's single
biggest problem: they are very heavily capitalized, they have to pay that back,
and in a couple of years when their patents expire, no one will be paying
$25,000 for their machines because HP will be selling ones for $800 in Radio
Shack.
All they want to do is to keep selling $25,000 machines to Ford and GM for as
long as possible, and the last thing they need is a load of clever students
thinking about alternatives. But people are beginning to drift out of the
cathedral and into the bazaar...
Yours
Adrian Bowyer
http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ensab
http://reprap.org
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