I can't understand the thinking in the boardrooms of these companies.
You're making a good product, but by no means something unique and irreplaceable. And then you pull nonsense like this one. Why? Don't they understand that they're just shooting themselves in the foot?
No, they don't understand. Or at least, the people making the decisions don't. They are far removed from the customers who try get the most out of their product. They probably are _aware_ of all the use-cases, but they only see it as something they can add as a feature for the enterprise segment. It's another future USP.
Let's hope they notice that their foot now has a hole in it and is bleeding all over the place.
They did feel the need to respond - so perhaps someone in there feels their maket share threatened.
But overall, what number of future printers and other recurring revenue do they expect to sell to production workshops, corporate, or low-tech users or other users which might take what they are sold "no matter what"? This is not a new problem. Do you / do we know the distribution of customers between the more advanced customers that may care and switch and the ones that won't even hear of the thing.
See also, printers, PDF or photo editing software, operating systems, all the way to mainframes. Realistically, advanced fans are rarely a significant share of the profits. And that's a problem of course. And for some companies it absolutely does come back and hurt them (IBM's competition did in the end succeed, and linux runs on most servers.)
If anything, for 3D printers, the competition is already here - much easier for the people who care.
Someone mentioned "App Store" during a meeting, probably accidentally. It's a known killer, the tech world equivalent of sneezing while carrying an infectious disease
This was the play all along - roll up the competition and then shore up all the profit once dominant enough.
I bet there are plans for new firmware $-unlocked pay-to-play features, making the AMS "more compatible" with Bambu filament (or eventually only Bambu filament for the next round or two of printers) and facilitating a lot more paid transactions and model purchases on Makerworld and taking the customary 30% cut.
The dominant enough part is questionable though! There were the go to... but that was based on a calculation price, quality, lack of hostility. People were already factoring in the cloudness of it and it just came ahead. Now other options will look better even if more expensive. They are the iPhone 1 not the 3S yet.
You're making a good product, but by no means something unique and irreplaceable. And then you pull nonsense like this one. Why? Don't they understand that they're just shooting themselves in the foot?