https://blog.jonasneubert.com/tags/digitalmanufacturing/Recent content in Digitalmanufacturing on Blog | Jonas NeubertHugoen-usSat, 04 Jan 2025 22:49:55 -0700https://blog.jonasneubert.com/2012/05/06/manufacturers-are-also-just-middlemen/Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.jonasneubert.com/2012/05/06/manufacturers-are-also-just-middlemen/<blockquote> <p>Any market where unnecessary middlemen stand between customers and their successful use of a solution is about to be disrupted.</p></blockquote> <p>This quote is from <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/1835983/the-simplicity-thesis">an article</a> by Box.net founder Aaron Levi on FastCompany.com. It got me thinking about how bad life must be as a Middle Man.</p> <p>In the article, Levi mentions Amazon and Ebay as examples for simplicity through disintermediation. Both companies drastically improved processes by removing intermediate parties, aka “Middle Men”. Ebay did it with private sales, and Amazon did it with book sales, then sales of everything, then server commissioning, then book authorship, and so on. Today the trend to kill middle men keeps most of the world&rsquo;s tech startups busy: Uber, Exec, Spotify, 23andMe, etc—everybody is trying to kill some sort of middle man. Who are these unfortunate people in the middle?</p>