"This story is about the next ten years.
"The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3D printing, are now available to individuals in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door and, once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.
"...Hardware is becoming much more like software," as MIT professor Eric von Hippel puts it. That's not just because there's so much software in hardware these days, with products becoming little more than intellectual property wrapped in commodity materials, whether it's the code that drives the off-the-shelf chips in gadgets or the 3D design files that drive manufacturing. It's also because of the availability of common platforms, easy-to-use tools, web-based collaboration and internet distribution.
"We've seen this picture before: it's what happens just before monolithic industries fragment in the face of countless small entrants, from the music industry to newspapers. Lower the barriers to entry and the crowd pours in.
"The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony. This change is driven by two forces. First, the explosion in cheap and powerful prototyping tools, which have become easier to use by non-engineers. And second, the economic crisis has triggered an extraordinary shift in the business practices of (mostly) Chinese factories, which have become increasingly flexible, web-centric and open to custom work (where the volumes are lower but the margins higher)...
"In short, atoms are the new bits."
