That wasn't fair. Pricing so close to COGS that you can't sustainably deliver the product isn't price innovation, nor is pricing so low that COGS forces you to deliver an inferior product; the comment you're responding to took pains to spell out why this particular 3d printer price didn't make much sense.
The consistent hostility towards low prices on HN is based on this site's manifest tendency to underprice things, or to calculate price from cost or from pie-eyed notions of how big their addressable markets are.
Total units shipped is incredibly low in 3D printing such that there are very few economies of scale. A certain Brooklyn firm has shipped 13,000. Ever. They have massive share of total and annual global shipments, including the highest of high end industrial printers.
We think that the technology is ready to drive this to a seriously large audience. Our COGS benefits from using the global supply chain and designing for manufacturing. It also benefits from scale. Sperry-Burroughs used to hand assemble a few products, then the world changed.
We're not priced to hand assemble in Brooklyn and would never make money doing so. But there are other, very high quality and proven, options.
But Tom, what basis do you have for suggesting they can't sustainably deliver the product? I don't know whether this is the case, I'm waiting to find out. But I'm perplexed by the assumption that they can't, and thought the grandparent comment assumed its conclusions. I don't agree on the inferior product angle; that assumes someone else should define what the minimal acceptable functionality is.
I don't necessarily think the PandaBot is directly competitive with the Makerbot- I'm sure corners have been cut to achieve that low price. But I don't necessarily need everything that the Makerbot does. It seems to me that as a technology is refined, you have the choice of adding more features, or keeping more limited features and lowering the price - that's what I'm referring to as price innovation.
Consider that the Thing-o-matic was $1200 or so, and people were happy with that at the time of release (3q 2010, IIRC). So the new Markerbot is a lot better, but it's also nearly twice the price. The PandaBot is offering something similar but simpler for $800-ish, which doesn't seem wildly unrealistic to me given the 2-year interval. I can see from the Kickstarter page that it's more of a no-frills product - one which requires more user supervision and safety-awareness, for example - but the tradeoff is that it costs less. I'm not sure whether I'd buy one (since it would be more of a hobby than a tool purchase), but being under $1000 is a big factor in any purchase decision.
Yeah, I don't know. You make a good point too. Maybe the parent comment was worded too stridently, but I thought it asked a valid question, and I think HN needs that question to be asked more, not less.
Comments
That wasn't fair. Pricing so close to COGS that you can't sustainably deliver the product isn't price innovation, nor is pricing so low that COGS forces you to deliver an inferior product; the comment you're responding to took pains to spell out why this particular 3d printer price didn't make much sense.
The consistent hostility towards low prices on HN is based on this site's manifest tendency to underprice things, or to calculate price from cost or from pie-eyed notions of how big their addressable markets are.
Product Manager again.
Total units shipped is incredibly low in 3D printing such that there are very few economies of scale. A certain Brooklyn firm has shipped 13,000. Ever. They have massive share of total and annual global shipments, including the highest of high end industrial printers.
We think that the technology is ready to drive this to a seriously large audience. Our COGS benefits from using the global supply chain and designing for manufacturing. It also benefits from scale. Sperry-Burroughs used to hand assemble a few products, then the world changed.
We're not priced to hand assemble in Brooklyn and would never make money doing so. But there are other, very high quality and proven, options.
But Tom, what basis do you have for suggesting they can't sustainably deliver the product? I don't know whether this is the case, I'm waiting to find out. But I'm perplexed by the assumption that they can't, and thought the grandparent comment assumed its conclusions. I don't agree on the inferior product angle; that assumes someone else should define what the minimal acceptable functionality is.
I don't necessarily think the PandaBot is directly competitive with the Makerbot- I'm sure corners have been cut to achieve that low price. But I don't necessarily need everything that the Makerbot does. It seems to me that as a technology is refined, you have the choice of adding more features, or keeping more limited features and lowering the price - that's what I'm referring to as price innovation.
Consider that the Thing-o-matic was $1200 or so, and people were happy with that at the time of release (3q 2010, IIRC). So the new Markerbot is a lot better, but it's also nearly twice the price. The PandaBot is offering something similar but simpler for $800-ish, which doesn't seem wildly unrealistic to me given the 2-year interval. I can see from the Kickstarter page that it's more of a no-frills product - one which requires more user supervision and safety-awareness, for example - but the tradeoff is that it costs less. I'm not sure whether I'd buy one (since it would be more of a hobby than a tool purchase), but being under $1000 is a big factor in any purchase decision.
Yeah, I don't know. You make a good point too. Maybe the parent comment was worded too stridently, but I thought it asked a valid question, and I think HN needs that question to be asked more, not less.