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Each individual manufacturing node will be autonomous, yet connected.
Manufacturers will form and re-form in temporary collectives as needed around
a particular project. Economies of scale will no longer dictate business models
since per part, it will cost the same to make one or ten thousand. Each individual
company will be versatile, able to make a wide variety of different products or
parts on short notice, on demand. Sometimes nodes will pool resources.
Cloud manufacturing will fuel innovation by lowering barriers to entry.
Innovation has lourished more quickly in the software industry because the
cost of entry is lower in the virtual world than in the physical world. Software
products aren't kept in physical inventory. A software product has no raw
materials and fewer logistics of transportation and assembly.
Here are two future scenarios.
First, imagine you need 10,000 staplers by the day after tomorrow. You
place your design ile and order onto the manufacturing cloud. In response,
thousands of small companies and individuals, each with a 3D printer (or two)
prints out a dozen or so staplers and ships them to you.
Wait a minute. Such a model wouldn't be cost-effective compared to mass
manufacturing 10,000 simple staplers. Cloud manufacturing simple commod-
ity items doesn't make sense. It would be cheaper and faster to mass produce
10,000 identical staplers in a few hours in a factory that has raw materials and
machines at the ready since it specializes in mass producing staplers.
What if, however, you needed a custom motorcycle made overnight?
You would put out a call on the same manufacturing cloud. Thousands
of companies would be automatically matched with the task of printing a
custom part and shipping it to you when it's completed. The next morning,
you would wake up and outside your door would be a small avalanche of a
thousand or so custom motorcycle parts, some metal, some plastic, some
big, some small.
When you use cloud computing, you don't know where the cloud's comput-
ing capacity is located. Cloud-based resources are scalable and automatically
load-balanced. When you use the manufacturing cloud you won't have to worry
about production capacity. The cloud will intelligently distribute production
and coordinate individual companies on the network to successfully absorb
your manufacturing request.
You simply place your order and click “Submit.”
Each cloud manufacturing company, alone, by itself, may be small. However,
like billions of cell phones or ants with factories, the combined whole will be
greater than the sum of its parts.
 
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