The @HACKADAY crowd has a very strong opinion (Bullshit) and I tend to agree because it’s about #takerbot - what I don’t get is why @Adafruit_Industries is participating in this obvious PR stunt.
Adafruit are a respected player in the Maker community. Makerbot cosying-up to them for PR purposes makes sense.
@Nathan_Walkner We can have our opinions on Hackaday, Adafruit and Makerbot.
The impression I get from Adafruit’s involvement in this is that Makerbot reached out to them in an attempt to re-engage with the Maker community. If they are prepared to admit they have made mistakes in their recent dealings with that community and they have a real desire to participate in that community again then they should be given a chance to have a voice.
A good opening move would be for Makerbot to address the shortcomings of the Gen5 machines and provide low cost or free updates to buyers who were affected by those shortcomings.
It is possible for commercial companies to play nice with open source as can be seen with what Autodesk are doing. This is because they are led by a CEO who understands open source and respects what it stands for. If Makerbot are committed to doing the same then we should at least listen before we judge.
Read the interview, makerbot is not committed in any way to the maker community, or open source movement. Notice the reply about 3rd party filaments, the CEOs reply is diplomatic to say the least, holding off the option of locking down filament to a later date. And a lame apology for the lack of quality in their machines. Talk is cheap, own up and fix your product.
The interview is crap, poorly written in a “he said/she said” manner. It is a poor attempt at trying to stay relevant after destroying the trust of the community.
There are a few things that makerbot MUST do to regain any resemblance of trust: repair the community by releasing the patents. Either give them to EFF or license them defensively alla Tesla.
Fix and replace all of your “smart” extruders. Refund those poor souls who purcased so many of your broken pruducts like the 3 pack of extruders.
Change the Thingiverse TOS and license. People want to own their stuff, not be bound by some legal mumbo that gives ownership to makerbot.
I am surprised you didn’t know this already @Nils_Hitze ; @Adafruit_Industries has always been super-cozy with Bre/MakerBot. I was actually banned from the “Makers/Hackers, etc” G+ community for pointing it out. When I, instead, posted it on my G+ profile, I was asked by @Limor_Fried to take it down or risk consequences.
Especially @phillip_torrone 's reaction to this
we are not stocking makerbots at this time, we haven’t for months. please see our post:
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Is Adafruit going to continue to sell Stratasys/MakerBot products and use their services? We do not know yet.
We’re going to get as much information as soon as possible and make a decision if were going to continue sell products / use services from Stratasys. Right now we will start to research what is posted in the MAKE article by Michael Weinberg. We will post our comments, thoughts and decisions as we get more information.
“Recently, they’ve seen a 74% satisfaction rate among Smart Extruder users and a 40 percent decline in Smart Extruder customer support cases since February 2015.”
That’s terribly low figures.
It means that 1/4 of the customers are not satisfied with their Smart Extruder (there’s always a lot of user who simply don’t contact the manufacturer but silently complain elsewhere)
40% less suppot cases may still be a huge number or not. No way of telling. A reason may of cause be that a lot of users have given up after 2 or 3 failures and see no benefit in contacting support yet again. (Or their machines are still in repair/exchange.)
“For the Digitizer, MakerBot was selling them below the cost we purchased them, that was really rough on us.”
WTF???
Based on my own experience in Customer Service it’s roughly a rate of 25 to 1 - 1 customer complaining means 25 having the problem without complaining