Originally Posted by
ReducedAirFact
True today, but...
A decade or two back, you could have said the same thing about the music industry. It was impossible for any brick & mortar shop -- or any record company -- to keep every album or CD in stock, and you were pretty much limited to what you could find in your local CD/record store or hunt up through sales of used media. Today, it's mostly digital sales, and the questions of inventory and materials are quaint relics of a bygone time. Video stores have mostly disappeared due to streaming and Netflix. The book-printing industry isn't that far behind.
I think the same thing is going to happen with 3D printing. If you've seen some of the recent announcements, it's clear that we're only a few years away (say, 2-10) when you can buy full-colored, strong, and highly detailed models with a nice finish -- much nicer than what we can get out of Shapeways today. You'll be able to internet-order via Shapeways, or you might phone something in to a local printer shop and drop by to pick it up an hour or two later. (Eventually the printers will make its way into the home directly, but that's further out.)
When that happens, "stock" of a product becomes an obsolete concept. All of the questions of inventory and shelf space disappear, and it may actually be easier to custom-order a full-color 3D print of (say) an Fokker D.V than it is to buy the cards to go with it! If Ares wants to get ahead of the curve, they should start thinking now how to embrace the 3D printing industry and the changes that are coming.
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