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RE: How the top 3D printer company just screwed the pooch
I'm very disappointed he found it necessary to cover Bambu Labs. Their debut in my awareness was so promising, bringing new ideas to additive manufacturing. They've dispelled a great deal of goodwill that I think was poorly leveraged, but could have been far more emunerative in the industry had they advanced AMS and lidar as I think they could have. Imagine a printer with a dozen or more articulated arms, one for each material (perhaps able to be added in an aftermarket), eliminating purging, and able to attain to high precision via lidar despite the slop inherent to articulated arms. Instead of breaking the rail paradigm and pushing boundaries that need exceeding, they resorted to bambu-zling their customers. SMDH.
As someone who has followed them since the beginning, I am honestly not surprised. They build a ecosystem where they are a tyrant. There was a third party firmware released about a year ago, it came as shock to everyone as no one expected someone to do it or be able to do it. Bambu's kneejerk reaction was to shut them down, but ultimately they worked with them and facilitated an optional firmware that allows you to run custom firmware. This to me was huge, even though the firmware didn't do anything I really cared about, it was a huge foothold for innovation. It was clear though Bambu really didn't want others having any sort of power in their ecosystem.
For me, this makes me very upset. Bambu products are the best in the industry. They did a good job disrupting the entire 3D printing community and force vendors who were fine with being meh to actually start innovating again to even be considered. They did it at a price that was fair and reasonable which made it even more of a big deal.
I was looking forward to their announcement for their next flagship product and was going to buy it without much thought. Now I am not sure I'd ever buy a Bambu product, and I don't think there is another vendor that has a product that matches what I have now. It makes me sad that anything is basically a step down.
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