the onda

Chris Anderson has a piece in the latest issue of Wired, "Atoms Are the New Bits" (not yet online) which chronicles the emergence of DIY hardware development. Covering the basics of prototyping tools like 3D printers and CNC machines, he goes on to make a connection to the newly emerging short-run Chinese manufacturing supply chain to explain how a new industrial revolution might take place, even going so far as to quote from my favorite fiction book of 2009, Cory Doctorow's Makers:

The days of companies with names like "General Electric" and "General Mills" and "General Motors" are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.

As with his article on the Long Tail from five years ago, I think Anderson is on to something very big here even if he doesn't get all the causation correct. Short run manufacturing could be the basis for a whole new industrial base here, but not necessarily because of the democratization of prototyping tools (which as the story of Makerbot Industries shows is indeed happening along the same story arc as the PC revolution), but because of the powerful combination of the Internet as a collaboration channel (for ideas) and the Internet as a demand aggregation and distribution channel (for niche interests, passions, and ultimately sales).

This is the story of Threadless, a company which exists today because it is perfectly evolved to take advantage of these two forces in the apparel space. But increasingly it may also become the story of much more complex products. The Wired piece covers a local Boston startup called Local Motors which is trying the approach with cars— a complex multi-component electromechanical product that has all sorts of safety and regulatory challenges. If they can pull it off there is no reason not to wonder about other similarly complex products.

For instance, just the other day I was commenting to someone that I'd love to have a smartphone that had an internal 3000 mAh (they mostly have 1/2 of that) and a cheap low-power 7-segment display for most of the notifications that it would normally power up the battery for— "the longest lasting smartphone in the world." One can argue whether such a monster might end up being the Spruce Goose of the category, but with Android we've got the software to be able to do just that, and looking through any of the iSuppli teardowns, you quickly realize that most of the internal components of these devices are increasingly as "standard" as what goes into your typical PC.

How far are we from the day when someone can start the Threadless of smartphones? Then we could go from custom cases and wallpapers to devices truly tailored to our specific needs.

There are many wrecked ships that have fallen victim to the siren song of mass customization, but given enough relevant customization in a product category that has enough demand and you may just have something here.