Baixem o IRC e não atrapalhem

O que andamos a escrever aqui já há algum tempo, e que faz confusão e gera dúvidas ao autor do artigo "The Difference Between Makers and Manufacturers":

"Though many of the products created this way so far are one-off novelty items and customized tchotchkes, ­[Chris] Anderson insists that the movement is about more than high-tech crafts for hobbyists.
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The ability of individuals and small startups to design items and either print them or send off the digital files and have them made is already transforming manufacturing, he proclaims, replacing mass production with custom production: “The idea of a ‘factory’ is, in a word, changing.”
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What kind of future might the maker movement bring us? Anderson envisions it could mean that “Western countries like the United States regain their lost manufacturing might, but rather than with a few big industrial giants, they spawn thousands of smaller firms picking off niche markets.”
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Anderson’s prediction that many consumers will move away from cheap mass-produced goods to the work of “industrial artisans” could someday come true. But, again, his evidence is unconvincing: “Just think of couture fashion or fine wines,” he writes. These are small markets. And for many other goods, people often prefer mass-­produced versions, because they cost less and are at least standardized, if not always great, in quality. ­Anderson suggests that “what the new manufacturing model enables is a mass market for niche products.” But he doesn’t attempt to quantify the economic impact of this shift to artisanal goods. He points to what he calls “happiness economics” rather than conventional macroeconomics as the real justification for custom production: “What’s interesting is that such hyperspecialization is not necessarily a profit-­maximizing strategy. Instead, it is better seen as meaning-­maximizing.”

Chris Anderson esteve na base da minha metáfora - Mongo - por isso não me surpreende que tenhamos seguido caminhos mentais paralelos. Imaginem que até temos alguma razão e, que evoluímos para uma versão daquilo a que chamo Mongo, em paralelo com as ascensão de novos modelos de negócio baseados não na posse mas no aluguer e partilha (recordar marcadores). Tendo isso em mente, como é que essa realidade pode chocar violentamente com o discurso da reindustrialização:

"O Presidente da República, Cavaco Silva, defendeu hoje que a retoma dos “caminhos da reindustrialização” deve ser encorajada pela União Europeia, que deve apoiar os Estados-membros na reestruturação das suas economias." 

Imagino, facilmente, políticos e funcionários, cheios de boas intenções, a decidirem o que é melhor para a sociedade. Como? Pensando no paradigma industrial do século XX, tentando replicar o passado, decidindo em que sectores actuar, privilegiando empresas grandes, privilegiando estratégias tornadas obsoletas.

Cuidado com a lição da Malásia, recordar "O offshoring mudou o mundo".

Baixem o IRC e não atrapalhem, deixem que quem se compromete com o seu dinheiro arrisque e ganhe ou perca.

Trecho retirado de "Cavaco Silva defende reindustrialização com o apoio da União Europeia"

Um conselho para makers

Um conselho retirado de "Makers - The New Industrial Revolution" de Chris Anderson.

"for hardware, which has inherent costs and must be paid for, charging the right price is key to building a sustainable business. One of the first mistakes budding Makers make when they start to sell their product is not charging enough. It’s easy to see why, for all sorts of reasons. They want the product to be popular, and they know the lower the price, the more it will sell. Some may even feel that if the product was created with community volunteer help, it would be unseemly to charge more than it costs. Such thinking may be understandable, but it’s wrong. Making a reasonable profit is the only way to build a sustainable business.
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What entrepreneurs quickly learn is that they need to price their product at least 2.3 times its cost to allow for at least one 50 percent margin for them and another 50 percent margin for their retailers (1.5 × 1.5 = 2.25). That first 50 percent margin for the entrepreneur is really mostly covering the hidden costs of doing business at a scale that they hadn’t thought of when they first started, from the employees that they didn’t think they’d have to hire to the insurance they didn’t think they’d need to take out and the customer support and returns they never expected. And the 50 percent margin for the third-party retailers is just the way the retail market works. (Most companies actually base their model on a 60 percent margin, which would lead to a 2.6x multiplier, but I’m applying a bit of a discount to capture that initial Maker altruism and growth accelerant.) ... if businesses don’t get the price right at the start, they won’t be able to keep making their products, and everyone loses. It’s the difference between a hobby and a real, thriving, profitable business."

Digital fabrication inverts the economics of traditional manufacturing

"the new manufacturing model enables is a mass market for niche products. Think ten thousand units, not ten million (mass) or one (mass customization). Products no longer have to sell in big numbers to reach global markets and find their audience. That’s because they don’t do it from the shelves of Wal-Mart. Instead, they use e-commerce, driven by an increasingly discriminating consumer who follows social media and word of mouth to buy specialty products online.
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these cottage industries with global reach targeting niche markets of distributed demand. “Boutique” is too pretentious, and “indie” not quite right.
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Digital fabrication inverts the economics of traditional manufacturing. In mass production, most of the costs are in up-front tooling, and the more complicated the product is and the more changes you make, the more it costs. But with digital fabrication, it’s the reverse: the things that are expensive in traditional manufacturing become free: 1. Variety is free: It costs no more to make every product different than to make them all the same. 2. Complexity is free: A minutely detailed product, with many fiddly little components, can be 3-D printed as cheaply as a plain block of plastic. The computer doesn’t care how many calculations it has to do. 3. Flexibility is free: Changing a product after production has started just means changing the instruction code. The machines stay the same."
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Trechos retirados de "Makers - The New Industrial Revolution" de Chris Anderson.

Choquei com Mongo esta semana

"Now the rise of the "artisanal" movement and mass-scale crafting has created widespread demand for such specialized goods. (Moi ici: Basta recordar este postal de hoje The bell curve is moving (mass geekery). Sim, we are all weird now)
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What's different about these niche physical goods, created by people and communities who aren't attempting to conform to the economic requirements of Big Manufacturing?
For starters, niche goods aimed at discriminating audiences can command higher prices. Just think of couture fashion or fine wines. Boutique products with unique qualities are polarizing - they may be just right for you but not for others. But the people they really are for are often willing to pay more for the privilege of being so well suited. From tailored clothes to fancy restaurants, exclusivity has always commande a premium.
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This is what i.materialize, a design firm, calls "the power of the unique." In a world dominated by one-size-fits-all commodity goods, the way to stand out is to create products that serve individual needs, not general ones. Custom-made bikes fit better. Right now this mostly the privilege of the rich, as such products require handcrafting. But what if they could be produced using digital manufacturing where there is no cost to complexity and no penality for short production runs?
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Increasingly, when computers are running the production machines, it costs no more to make each product different.
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The old model of expensive custom machines that had to make the same thing in vast numbers to justify the tooling expense is fading fast.
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These niche products tend to be driven by people's wants and needs rather than companies' wants and needs."
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Este texto podia ter sido retirado deste blogue, bastava seleccionar postais com o marcador Mongo, fazer o corte, a colagem e a tradução.
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Esta semana, durante um almoço com empresário que tem empresa que vive da injecção de peças plásticas, em que o molde é propriedade do cliente, percebi como já há mercado para as impressoras 3D (embora o empresário nunca tivesse ouvido falar em tal coisa).
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Façamos um esquema:

Duas empresas sem know-how industrial (Cliente do cliente) com ideias para pequenas séries, fazem by-pass ao seu fornecedor (Cliente (dono do molde)), talvez para não criarem misturas com o seu modelo de negócio actual, e pedem ao injectador que aposte nos projectos. Como o injectador só conhece o trabalhar com moldes os projectos morrem ali...

Trecho de "Makers - The New Industrial Revolution" de Chris Anderson

Sintomas da economia DIY a regressar

Mais um trecho de "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution" de Chris Anderson:

"The past ten years have been about discovering new ways to create, invent, and work together on the Web. The next ten years will be about applying those lessons to the real world.
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Wondrous as the Web is, it doesn’t compare to the real world. Not in economic size (online commerce is less than 10 percent of all sales), and not in its place in our lives. The digital revolution has been largely limited to screens. We love screens, of course, on our laptops, our TV’s, our phones. But we live in homes, drive in cars, and work in offices. We are surrounded by physical goods, most of them products of a manufacturing economy that over the past century has been transformed in all ways but one: unlike the Web, it hasn’t been opened to all. Because of the expertise, equipment, and costs of producing things on a large scale, manufacturing has been mostly the provenance of big companies and trained professionals.

That’s about to change.

Why? Because making things has gone digital: physical objects now begin as designs on screens, and those designs can be shared online as files. This has been happening over the past few decades in factories and industrial design shops, but now it’s happening on consumer desktops and in basements, too. And once an industry goes digital, it changes in profound ways, as we’ve seen in everything from retail to publishing. The biggest transformation is not in the way things are done, but in who’s doing it. Once things can be done on regular computers, they can be done by anyone. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen now in manufacturing.

Today, anyone with an invention or good design can upload files to a service to have that product made, in small batches or large, or make it themselves with increasingly powerful digital desktop fabrication tools such as 3-D printers. Would-be entrepreneurs and inventors are no longer at the mercy of large companies to manufacture their ideas."

Ainda esta manhã, durante o noticiário das 8h00 na Antena 1, um repórter em Bragança relatava que está a regressar o hábito de fazer o pão em casa... mais um sintoma da economia DIY a regressar. Sim, não é só a tecnologia de ponta: é a cultura que vê como natural produzir comida, roupa, agricultura, jardinagem. Prosumers com indústrias de vivenda... o velho casal Toffler acertou em toda a linha. 

Acerca do futuro da economia

"The history of the past two decades online is one of an extraordinary explosion of innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s now time to apply that to the real world, with far greater consequences.
We need this. America and most of the rest of the West is in the midst of a job crisis. Much of what economic growth the developed world can summon these days comes from improving productivity, which is driven by getting more output per worker. That’s great, but the economic consequence is that if you can do the same or more work with fewer employees, you should. Companies tend to rebound after recessions, but this time job creation is not recovering apace. Productivity is climbing, but millions remain unemployed.
Much of the reason for this is that manufacturing, the big employer of the twentieth century (and the path to the middle class for entire generations), is no longer creating net new jobs in the West. Although factory output is still rising in such countries as the United States and Germany, factory jobs as a percentage of the overall workforce are at all- time lows. This is due partly to automation, and partly to global competition driving out smaller factories.(Moi ici: A nossa realidade é completamente diferente neste ponto. A globalização aniquilou as empresas grandes, as fábricas que sobreviveram foram as que se reinventaram e ficaram mais pequenas)
Automation is here to stay— it’s the only way large- scale manufacturing can work in rich countries. But what can change is the role of the smaller companies. Just as startups are the driver of innovation in the technology world, and the underground is the driver of new culture, so, too, can the energy and creativity of entrepreneurs and individual innovators reinvent manufacturing, and create jobs along the way.
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The great opportunity in the new Maker Movement is the ability to be both small and global. Both artisanal and innovative. Both high-tech and low-cost. Starting small but getting big. And, most of all, creating the sort of products that the world wants but doesn’t know it yet, because those products don’t fit neatly into the mass economics of the old model."

Trechos retirados de "Makers - The New Industrial Revolution" de Chris Anderson

A cauda longa e o planeta Mongo

Quando tinha 12, 13, 14 anos delirava com as histórias de banda desenhada de revistas como o "Mundo de Aventuras" ou o "Falcão", um dos heróis dessas histórias era Flash Gordon.

Recordo muito bem uma história que me deixou um gosto, um sabor de incredulidade na altura. Ás tantas, no meio do enredo aparecia uma prancha com um mapa detalhado do planeta Mongo, que incluía não só a geografia dos continentes, ilhas, rios, mares e oceanos, como também os diferentes povos que habitavam o planeta.

O que me deixou incrédulo foi a perspectiva de existirem, num memo planeta, na mesma época, povos com culturas e sobretudo, com níveis tecnológicos tão distintos, não por dificuldade ou pobreza, mas por opção. Aos meus olhos de juvenil imberbe, tal era impossível, todos caminhávamos para a uniformização ocidental, e quem ainda lá não estava era por dificuldade, não por opção.

Anos depois, esta imagem do planeta Mongo veio-me à mente quando vi as imagens de uma conferência de imprensa improvisada, na selva filipina, por um grupo de guerrilheiros de uma facção separatista islâmica(?). Tinham catanas e velhas espingardas... para combater o exército filipino!!!

Ontem, voltei a recordar esta imagem do planeta Mongo, ao assistir à apresentação de Chris Anderson, o homem da cauda longa.

A internet vai ajudar, já está a promover, o estilhaçar de uma sociedade em que todos vestem as mesmas roupas, lêem os mesmos jornais, vêem os mesmos noticiários, acompanham as mesmas séries, comem as mesmas comidas... Mongo is coming to your door, não por necessidade, não por incapacidade, mas por opção, aliás, por milhares de opções.

Se Chris Anderson tiver razão, e espero bem que sim, trata-se de uma esperança, para as sociedades dos países pequenos. Quanto mais aumentar o poder da cauda longa, mais oportunidades de negócio existirão, para as pequenas empresas, rápidas e flexíveis que apostarem na diferenciação, na diversidade, na variedade. A cabeça pode ficar para os asiáticos, mas a nata das margens, essa ficará para quem, como dizia Jesus Cristo, tiver olhos para ver, e ouvidos para ouvir, a corrente, a tendência de fundo.