He was not expecting it to be good, he doesn't give a crap. His message came through loud and clear and that was what he wanted. Personally I think 3-D printing is going to do to what I call the "dictatorship of IP" (and my son calls "The Disney Sponsored Violation of the Constitution) that cheap printing (samizdat) did to physical dictatorships. My wife thinks I am nuts, but I believe that in just a few years, maybe a decade, it will be possible to print drugs. So the actual lifespan of a patent will be the amount of time it takes to reverse engineer the drug. Or what you'll actually pay for is the personalization of the medicine, the actual medicine will have a generic cost because it's just printed on demand, probably at a pharmacy. It's gonna be awesome. -XC
Printing ICs is the small scale manufacturing technology I'm waiting for. Getting a small batch done isn't that expensive, assuming you get it right the first time, but once you can fabricate your own most consumer electronics are doable in garage shops. Then hardware is in the same place as software and content. Drugs are a little different, I think. There's never going to be one device to synthesize them all, but there doesn't really need to be. The regulatory process is a bigger barrier to setting up in that space than any technological problem. You can't remove the need for tons of capital to do the work, because you're just not allowed to do the work without it. If drug patents are to be done away with, it's going to have to be as a side effect of the tides turning against patents in general.
Indeed, 3-D printing has the potential to revolutionize a lot (you could finally download a car!) and rock many different players in different industries. I'm excited to see where it goes next. Of course, you know that those players won't go down without a fight.