Are 3D Printers the Next Avalanche Tech?

For some time now I’ve been using Seth Godin’s blog as a window into the thinking of business types.  Here he talks of “avalanche opportunities,” those moments when effort put into a system can have huge paybacks.  Avalanche opportunites are what happens when something big is almost here.

Avalanche opportunites were everywhere during the 70′s and 80′s.  The release of the Apple II, that was an avalanche.  Once the public started to realize that computers weren’t room-filling machines that cost as much as a house anymore, the whole face of the market changed, dramatically, and really really rapidly.  And soon after that, personal computers were everywhere.  Before that, virtually nowhere, although hobby-like boxes like the Altair 8800 did exist.

The nostalgia tales of the Apple II have a really familiar ring to me.  A machine you had to know from the ground up to really use well, which was really less capable than the huge commercial machines but still capable of amazing feats the suits hadn’t figured out were enough to change the landscape, a hardcore group of dedicated hackers and nerds who got a visceral thrill from making discoveries that made everyone’s machine more useful just from some copied code– this is what the Apple II was like.

It’s also what the latest crop of 3D printers is like.

I’ve seen first hand and heard from others that 3D printing is at a point where it can do amazing things, but most people don’t know they can do amazing things.  As usability creeps up, with upgrades to slicing software and on-printer firmware, 3D printers will start to look more like plug-and-play fabricators.  And if I’m right, the next decade or so could be all about inexpensive personal fabrication, every bit as much as the ninties were all about inexpensive computers.