Quote Originally Posted by Chris Neal View Post
In my case Weike benefitted the most from GF's adverts, because GF got me interested but GW got the sale.
Chris, You have perfectly fulfilled my prediction from my earlier post about GF "spreading the gospel" of lasers, which can only benefit all the other laser suppliers.

Copied from my earlier post:

I think it will be interesting to see what this Glowforge does to the entire low cost laser industry. Anyone selling low cost CO2 lasers wants them to be a household word, because once the general public gets a taste of the abilities of what a laser can do, they will want more, better, and bigger machines.

Seems like Glowforge will either go through serious growing pains (imagine their tech support fielding questions from the dumbest of the dumb about why it didn't engrave in the same colors of the photo they used), and survive to sell for several years after paid warranties, or they will go under due to tech support problems, or whatever we all on this forum speculate. Bottom line is that more people will be AWARE of laser cutting / engraving.

Lots of folks on this forum have lasers in their garages, and I should have had one fifteen years ago - so many uses.

My prediction is that the mainstream laser companies will benefit from any outcome of Glowforge - successful or not - in the long run.

For example, one of the major plastics suppliers did a mass marketing campaign of dichroic (color-changing)laminated acrylic. Made the stuff common knowledge. Got a lot of architects and designers hooked on it. Then they discontinued the product due to technical issues and raw material cost increases. Those architects, designers and public artists scrambled to find an alternative (my product).