Fascinating implication for the future of 3-D printers.

It's long tail, baby!

“What we’re clearly doing is enabling a new class of entrepreneurial companies that can address markets of 10k. YOu know, 10 thousand is kind of an arbitrary number, but when you think of 10,000, it’s too small for a big company and too [large] for an individual. And yet, what the maker market does it allows you to prototype things, get funding, and then have access to manufacturing that can sort of scale up. It allows you to target to those markets of 10,000.

Now, some of those markets of 10,000 are going to stay at 10,000, they are niche, the ‘long tail’ stuff if you will, referring to my first book. But some of them are going to be the next markets of 10 million. And what’s great about the markets that start at 10,000 and then kind of organically make it to 10 million is that those products are going to be ones the world has asked for, that the world has helped develop. They’ve passed the test of the marketplace.”

The maker movement is about going out and happening to things.

Ouya.

Small nitpick, but I think it makes more sense to refer to movements in post, not pre. When did they start calling the industrial revolution as such?

Industrial Revolution lasted 1750 to 1850.

The earliest use of the term "Industrial Revolution" seems to be a letter of 6 July 1799 by French envoy Louis-Guillaume Otto, announcing that France had entered the race to industrialize.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

I like the quotes, but I disagree with the premise of the article.

Why so?

A new class of hobbyists, but not a new class of entrepreneurial companies. Companies require revenue or funding to sustain themselves; I'm not sure the folks who are going to be a part of the maker movement have the wherewithal to stomach being a mom-and-pop shop as well.

You never know. The Maker Faire is usually filled with such people.

I like things to happen; and if they don't happen, I like to make them happen. ~Winston Churchill

Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others MAKE it happen. ~Michael Jordan

Elon Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work

http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/musk_qa

Thanks, I had never heard that Elon line before.

Destiny is for losers. It's just a stupid excuse to wait for things to happen instead of making them happen. ~Blair Waldorf