TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

MakerBot’s Bre Pettis thinks 3D printing could be, well, revolutionary:

“The next industrial revolution,” is what Pettis says that MakerBot is trying to incite. The first brought us machines that allowed for mass production and replication, the next should give us individual control over those machines, rather than it being relegated to the purview of tooling companies and manufacturing complexes.

3D printing is certainly a big deal, but I’m not quite sure it’s that big. For relatively simple objects, it’s an incredible step forward for people to be able to test, and even manufacture, the object on their own. But unless I’m missing something, unless this kind of process allows more complex objects to be manufactured in the future, it seems fairly limited to me.

What’s more interesting to me is the commodification of manufacturing. Rather than necessarily build whatever we think up on our own, what if we instead can use a manufacturing service that’s similar to the plethora of web services available? That is, high-quality, scalable and affordable manufacturing available to anyone. That, I think, would end up being more important than 3D printing itself.

Together, though, these two ideas allow some incredible things. One of them is that physical objects could be available as digital files, rather than the object itself, like open source software. You download the files (the design, of course, was updated by people online), print them on your 3D printer or send them to a manufacturing service, and you have the object.