makezine.com/10/nff

News From the Future

STUFF LIKE

SOFTWARE

ONE OF THE THINGS WE LOOK FOR AT O’Reilly Media is people who know how to do magic. These are people who can surprise us by their mastery of technology, some trick or two that makes us start with surprise and say, “How did you do that?” As in the famous Arthur C. Clarke dictum, it isn’t really magic, just something they know that we don’t. Sometimes the magic is a simple hack or tool. Sometimes it’s a really big, world-changing idea that they’ve just caught on to before everyone else.

The first websites were like that. In 1993, people’s eyes bugged out when they saw someone click a link on what appeared to be a document on a PC screen, and suddenly pull up another document from a server halfway around the world. Now it’s taken for granted; the magic has moved on. Today, the greatest magic appears to be in the area of manufacturing. Some people know how to make stuff, and others merely marvel.

Now I’m not just talking about the kind of making celebrated in these pages, the magic exposed, step by step. Cool as that is, there’s nothing hidden. I’m talking about the kind of magic that MAKE columnist and kite enthusiast Saul Griffith hinted at in a recent conversation: “We sent in our new kite design on

Monday and were testing it on Friday.”

What’s magical about that? It’s a signal about the coming revolution in the manufacturing supply chain. You see, Saul’s kites are designed on a custom CAD program, and prototypes are manufactured quantity one by a factory in China, and delivered halfway around the world in a matter of days.

I found myself marveling at a similar bit of magic when talking with Saul’s colleague at Squid Labs,

Colin Bulthaup, who has a new company called Potenco, commercializing the portable power generator they designed for the One Laptop per Child project. Colin casually showed me a table full of prototypes of the pull-string charger, all looking like they’d come fresh from a blister pack at Best Buy. How’d he do that? No handmade prototypes these.

By Tim O’Reilly

It used to be hard to get stuff made. You made something yourself, or it was mass-produced. There wasn’t a whole lot in between. But now, the internet and what Thomas Friedman calls “the flat world” are making it easier and cheaper to have not just a workshop but a factory at your beck and call.

“We’re now able to iterate on a hardware design on a weekly basis,” Colin says. “This is leading to rapid exploration of ideas in hardware analogous to what we’ve gotten used to in software. Up to a year ago, what you’d get were mockups. Now you can get fully functional mechanical prototypes.” It’s still relatively expensive to get these prototypes made, and there’s more magic required to scale up to consumer (or mass customization) quantities, but the writing is already on the wall.

This news from the future affects not just makers who are starting to think about becoming entrepreneurs, but also consumers. As factories and supply chains become smarter, we’re seeing a future of mass customization. And entrepreneurs are harnessing all the power of the internet to approach manufacturing in new, creative ways.

Threadless.com is a great example. Using Digg-like voting systems, they encourage users to submit,

vote on, and discuss T-shirt designs, and then they manufacture and sell the most popular designs. Threadless was reportedly up to $20 million in revenue last year. If you have to get to scale before you can manufacture something, you can now aggregate the demand before spending a nickel.

All of this is not to mention that personal fabrication devices are following the same price curve that we saw with typesetting in the 1980s, leading up to the desktop publishing revolution. We’ve seen offers for a $2,000 laser cutter, down from $16,000 a year ago.

In short, get ready for a future in which stuff looks a lot more like software.

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Tim O’Reilly ( tim.oreilly.com) is founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. See what’s on the O’Reilly Radar at radar.oreilly.com.

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