3DPrint.com's Interview With Jenny Lawton from MakerBot

[Brian_Krassenstein]

At CES in Las Vegas last week, 3DPrint.com had the chance to talk with Jenny Lawton, CEO of MakerBot. During the conversation, Lawton opened up about MakerBot's new prospects and future directions, as well as her experiences as the CEO. She is also projecting a bright future where in 12 years 3D printing will be much more on the radar. Read up on the full interview -- including Lawton's views on potential partnerships, the company's Smart Extruder, thoughts on new printing materials, and more -- in the full article: http://3dprint.com/36759/makerbot-ceo-jenny-lawton/
Below is a photo of MakerBot CEO Jenny Lawton:

[richardphat]

These materials show you the benefit of the Smart Extruders. When you look at the MakerBot Smart Extruder, we will pair a Smart Extruder to work with metals. We’ll pair a Smart Extruder to work with woods. You are able to swap out the extruder, so it doesn’t mean you will have to go buy a new printer to do something different. When you look at why we came out with the Smart Extruder, we came out with it for a few reasons. One was because the biggest problem people have with 3D printers is problems with your extruder, so the ability to put in a new extruder in seconds and then be up and running right away is great. We also designed it so that you have the flexibility of using different materials or having a different extruder do a different process or task.

A complete farce, let's not fix the whole horsecrap and make it worse?

We have always iterated on our technology, and I look at our printers as something that increase in value versus decrease in value because of the level of innovation and iteration that goes into our products. We’ve continued to work on the Smart Extruder, and the extruder that we have today combined with the firmware and software that we have is a very good experience. We recognized that there were problems with the early extruders, and one of the benefits of MakerBot is that we have a warranty for our extruder. If you look at some of the other players out there, they don’t warranty the extruder. So the benefit of the warranty is that people have made use of it.

Pretty sure you royally screwed my friend by making him trying to buy a new makerbot printer instead of doing your tech support, and funny he had to pay extras cash for the smart extruder....

As we started to uncover some of the problems that people have been having, we made changes to the extruder to make it a much better experience. The way that the [Smart] Extruder works is different from the extruder on the Replicator 2, which is a much simpler extruder. We wanted to add a lot of technology and “smarts” to it and it didn’t necessarily always behave smartly. It does the Z-homing, and it does detection of filaments. It also has a lot of statistics and logging capabilities, so we can get information about [it].

Thank you for over engineering when you could have left it simple. The Ultimaker nozzle in our office has been working for 2 year without any trouble and so does other brand.

I'd like to add more, but I feel makerbot doesn't deserve feedback with how they have utterly messed up.