We’ve heard a lot about “enshittification”, but why hasn’t it happened in 3D printing?
If you somehow haven’t heard of the concept, it is the concept of how a company eventually declines in today’s highly competitive environments, invented by author Cory Doctorow. It goes something like this:
- Win users – great free/cheap service.
- Exploit users for businesses – ads, fees, restrictions.
- Exploit everyone for itself – maximize extraction.
- Decline – users + partners leave, platform dies.
It’s related to stock market concepts. There are two kinds of stocks: growth or income.
A growth stock is one that has a significant amount of growth possible. Think of a company in a new market where everyone has yet to buy the product. The value of a growth stock is that over time its stock price will rise as the business grows. You bet on the future.
An income stock is quite different. It’s typically in a very mature industry where there is little growth possible. Value comes from the company’s annual profit, some of which is issued to stockholders as a dividend. You expect a cheque every year.
Think of airlines, for example. That’s a mature industry where the technology has been basically perfected and all players use the same products and services. That’s quite different than, say, an AI company where there are plenty of people that haven’t become customers yet, and there are many ways to improve the product dramatically. One type of company can grow tremendously, while the other cannot.
And then there are the stockholders. You might think the stockholders are all rich folks and big businesses, but there are also many individuals with much smaller holdings. If you have any money at all in a fund, you are indirectly investing in companies.
All of these stockholders, large and small, expect their holdings to grow. The media coverage of many massive growth companies tilts the thinking towards growth: stockholders expect growth, and demand that of the companies they’ve invested in, even indirectly. This expectation occurs even when it’s unreasonable to expect natural growth.
This puts all companies in positions where they have to grow.
Some companies have it easier: just sell to more customers, and we grow.
Others have a bigger problem: what if you have run out of customers? If everyone has a microwave oven, how do you sell more microwave ovens? After international expansion, there’s not much these companies can do.
That’s why you see enshittification in some of these companies: they don’t have any alternatives to making more money to grow. Their investors have unrealistic expectations and expect growth. This causes the companies to monetize everything possible, leading them down the enshittification cycle.
What about the 3D print industry, specifically the desktop market?
At this point, there are still relatively few people with 3D printers, even though millions have been sold. There are billions of people on the planet, and there are countless millions of more possible customers.
Today’s 3D print companies can grow relatively easily because there are so many more possible customers. They are nowhere near market saturation.
In addition, the technology can change. Each year, we see dramatic changes. Two years ago, it was high-speed 3D printing; last year, it was AI features; this year, it’s waste-free multicolor printing. Next year, it will be something else. A company with a game-changing technology advantage can quickly score many more customers.
Each of those technological changes opens up the possibility of selling more, and to more customers. That’s growth.
It will likely remain this way for quite a while. But at some point, we will find the technology mostly settled at a point where it provides what people need, and every company markets that functionality.
It’s at that point we will see widespread increased monetization as companies struggle to continue growing. Shifting from a growth stock to an income stock is often not pretty.
For now, enjoy the good stage of the 3D printing lifecycle.
