Alibre Acquired by 3D Systems: Is the Maker Movement Going Mainstream and Big Bucks?

This is a fascinating development (hat tip to Dezignworks blog for putting me on to it). 3D Systems is a 3D printing company (think everything from personal Reprap-style extruders on up to commercial industrial strength solutions) that went public relatively recently. They’re showing nearly $180 million a year in revenue and a market cap of over $1.2 billion. Evidently their newly-minted public stock currency has enabled them to go on a shopping spree for technologies they view as strategic. I’ve been saying for a while that in a CNC world, digital tooling is just as important as and perhaps more important than actual physical tooling. 3D has certainly put their money on that idea by buying up the “cheap Solidworks” parameteric modelling company, Alibre. It’s interesting that they think they need to control the software to be successful when there are so many CAD packages out there competing for mindshare. Alibre was a great catch in terms of its user base and the quality of the software versus what they likely had to pay–it has the mindshare footprint of a much larger player, in other words.

A student using a RapMan 3D printer from 3D Sytems…

It will be interesting to see what direction they want to take the Alibre software in. Are they aiming to make 3D accessible even more cheaply? Do they want to add functions and go more upmarket? Will prices be going up? Down? Staying put? Will they push Alibre to benefit their own market and 3D printing at the expense of it being a more general product? It’s too early to tell any of that, though they do say in the press releases they’ll be continuing to develop Alibre.

Even more interesting is what this transaction says about the emerging Maker Movement. Check out MAKE Magazine to get a sense of it, but I love the Maker Movement. It’s all about the idea that building things is not only fun, but hip. It’s about time kids and the country in general decided manufacturing was hip.

I’ve been back and forth with several Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists about how real this possibility is for manufacturing to go mainstream and personal. Their general feeling is it is a niche that will always be small, but I disagree–I think it can be really big and sooner than we think.

We’ve seen it happen over a long period of time with the printed word until eventually we all can print and publish on the Internet. That transition created many fortunes and happened rapidly once we had laser printers and the Internet. What if everyone had access to the means of manufacturing? It doesn’t really threaten conventional manufacturing in any meaningful way–they have much more sophisticated machinery, software, and know-how and will probably always be able to build it faster, better, cheaper. But the potential is for individuals to be able to do their own thing, from customizing products to creating whole new personal products all on their own. The machinery has already come way down in price for this, but software has remained stubbornly expensive–too expensive in many cases for a garage shop. As the hardware spreads, there is a growing opportunity on the software side, and good for 3D Systems for seeing that and placing some early bets.

It’ll be exciting to watch it all unfold. Meanwhile, it’s got me thinking I need to run another survey and see what CAD systems our readers are using and how many are on Alibre. We ran a similar survey on CAM software and the results were very interesting. I’ll get a CAD software survey up in the near future.

Related posts:

1. Have You Seen the Maker Movement, MakerBots, and RepRap?