Not a good day for #MakerBot and #Stratasys . It appears they’ve been cooking the books a bit and cutting corners, at least allegedly.
Your synopsis is not an accurate reading of the plantiff’s filings. They were not alleged to be “cooking the books” or “cutting corners”. The statements with which the suit calls in question are press releases and a conference call. There is no alleging that the financial filings or accounting methods were fraudulent, only that statements made were done so to mislead investors. Adafruit has posted the full complaint. http://www.adafruit.com/pdfs/makerbot/classaction.pdf
There is also no complaint of so called “cutting corners”. The complaint alleges poor product they kept selling while knowing it was poor. The class hasn’t been certified so it’s not yet a class action suit.
It’s basically this, they paid too much, market was never there, shipped poor product, tanked the stock. The plaintiffs want some compensation due to investment losses. This suit will do zero for the users that bought the bad machines. It’s only for the investors that lost money when the stock tanked. I’d bet Stratasys will settle and we’ll hear nothing more of it. What I think they should do is once they fix the extruder issues would be to replace all of the Gen 5 extruders, at no cost the end user.
Good info and duly noted. Thanks
Yup
I’m not surprised.
They support education like the Vikings would a newly discovered land.
Rape and pillage !
@Nathan_Walkner I agree, they won’t make the users that bought those units whole unless there is some sort of user based lawsuit.
The part in question is more complex than a simple fan cooling a barrel. If you look at Appendix 1 in the filing there are pics of notes on a whiteboard that seem to be from an engineering meeting. It appears that it’s a mechanical/software integration issue that was compounded by a weak engineering staff and poorly trained CS reps. They’ve made some progress, the newer units are better but they still have issues. At the point those were produced they were out of their depth and the quality of the product and Q&A shows. It’s not nefarious, they just weren’t that good at what they were doing. As a result a lot of people spent a lot of money on a poor product.
The assessment of the brand being damaged beyond repair is due more to bias than actual conditions in the market. Were the brand that damaged, they wouldn’t have been able to get the big box retail distribution deals they have recently. Most people that are interested in a 3D printer that aren’t part of this echo chamber only see most of the positive press that comes over the PR wire to mainstream media. Stratasys will weather through it and Makerbot will become a few machines on the low end much like 3DS has done with Cube.
You would think that would make sure that things work well with 3D printing being new to the market. They could be part of the top 3D printer companies but now they seem to failing to achieve that.