Just wondering aloud, here, could it be that the open source company comes from a place of feigned or real enlightenment that makes it hard to compete on hardware cost, as the lowest-possible hardware cost may require unethical practices in sourcing or production? Even something like "manufactured in the USA", if that were something you're into, I have to imagine, might make it hard to compete on hardware cost, compared to China.
Yes, quite likely. This is not really a matter of FOSS or not, but it is something that Prusa absolutely needed to have foreseen and made a viable business plan to address. Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that.
That could have taken many forms. They might have invested in a much stronger brand, aiming to make Prusa (needs a better name tbh) synonymous with 3D printing, and developing a product line which covers a wider range of needs, from entry-level highly-usable stuff up to hackable mid-tier things and possibly high-end workshop printers as well, all of which should have had a shared brand identity. China can't really compete on reputation, so that's where to focus. Moreover, they could have invested more in services surrounding the product, such as the aforementioned cloud printing services, perhaps a thingiverse-equivalent with a models marketplace and a small margin off of that, etc. Auto-detect when your filament is running low and have a subscription service to ship you a new one -- maybe the cloud printer notices when you don't have enough in stock for a model you want and suggests you order more.
Just making a new model every 2 or 3 years and hoping China wouldn't notice was a very stupid strategy, and the free or non-free nature of their firmware has nothing to do with that.
This is such a common failure mode in open source companies -- they think that the code is 90% of the battle for the market. It's not, it's more like 5% at best and because it's open source the rest of the market can make use of it. This can be very powerful if you're smart about it, but "write the code and the rest will work out" is not that.
> Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that.
none of those plans would work - at best they're a gamble.
> China can't really compete on reputation
nor will they. The competition is always going to be on price. It's why counterfits exists as a market, but not only counterfits but also white-labeled copies.
The only thing that china cannot clone is technology they cannot get access to - such as high tech semi conductors, and that's thru a lot of losses copped by the shareholders by fiat from the US gov't.
Yes, it's a gamble. But having exactly one 3D printer model at a high price point and doing nothing else is also a gamble, and a much stupider one.
Western manufacturing is at odds with China for the reasons you stated, but free software eliminates this competitive advantage entirely and you need to plan for your output to be reused by your competitors as a fundamental part of your business model.
> nor will they. The competition is always going to be on price. It's why counterfits exists as a market, but not only counterfits but also white-labeled copies.
I’m not convinced that this is true. DJI, Roborock, Dreame, Xiaomi are all brands that compete to some degree on brand reputation.
