IMO it will continue grow relatively slowly and its growth will be highly dependent on the health of the overall economy. Even to many manufacturing industries and start-ups, RP is still pretty hard to justify bringing in-house and might still be viewed as more of a 'luxury' rather than a necessity. Also, because it has very few direct consumer applications, is still very expensive to acquire and use, and appears to have little or NO inherent entertainment value (after you've seen it work 1-2 times, it's a little like watching grass grow), I don't think consumers will ever be knocking the doors down at Best Buy to get their own 'fabber' (much to the disappointment of many longtime cheerleaders out there). No folks, in the long run, I think this field will only appeal to those of us who don't mind working long hours, for little pay, in the 'manufacturing trenches' and who could best be described as, die hard gear-heads (like Jay Leno), and/or super-nerds.
G. Sachs
________________________________
From: Elaine Hunt <ewhunt@bellsouth.net>
To: rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi
Sent: Fri, January 8, 2010 6:49:39 PM
Subject: Re: [rp-ml] free STL Files and other (free) things we wish for in the new year
If the RP industry has moved very little in the past 20 years, the question in my minds is why?
>
>Is it still perceived as a toy maker? Has it been held back by the service bureau (why own it) industry, or is there some other thing happening that we as RP devotees are missing?
>
>Is the industry moving forward, sitting still, or slowly dying?
>
>
>Elaine
>
>
Received on Sat Jan 09 02:59:38 2010
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Fri Mar 11 2011 - 05:24:18 EET