UPS foretells the fabber revolution

by Marshall Burns, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1999, Ennex Corporation

     U.S. residents may recently have seen a television commercial for United Parcel Service that presents four scenarios of a fabber being used in the home or office. The message of the commercial is that until you can have products delivered to you by fabber, UPS will be the next best option. The advertising executives who produced the spot felt pretty confident that “until” meant “never,” but regular readers of this newsletter know better.

     The UPS commercial gives four examples that I would never have chosen to illustrate home and office fabber use. These scenarios are, in fact, better than anything I have ever thought of. Although it has long been my mantra that future fabbers will be able to make anything you want, it is quite another matter to come up with four good, specific examples of small, simple products that people might buy by fabber.

     When the commercial was created by Mark Ronquillo and produced by Niko Courtelis, both of international advertising agency Ammirati Puris Lintas, they thought they were writing fantasy. This helped free them to think beyond the bounds of such mundane issues as practicality and feasibility.

     The four products shown being delivered by fabbers in the UPS spot are: a scuba fin, a trombone, an office water bottle with water in it, and a football. The scenarios are depicted with humor and drama, and they brilliantly utilize what look like everyday computer printers and photocopiers to create the illusion of machines fabbing real three-dimensional products. Not only do the scenarios show four different products emerging from users’ computers, they do it for four very different and appropriate types of customers: a couple of middle-aged sportsmen in a lakeside lodge, a stuffed-shirt tycoon in the office of his ornate mansion, a pair of young professionals in a typical modern business office, and a teenager tapping on the computer with his mother quietly knitting in the background.

     When will fabbers that can do these things be available? Obviously, this question involves many unknown factors. It is interesting and worthwhile, however, to ponder the possibilities.

     It is an interesting coincidence that the scenarios appear in the UPS commercial in exactly what I consider to be their order of difficulty. (This really is a coincidence. According to Courtelis, not one of the approximately 100 writers, directors, actors, crew, and other personnel involved in the production of this commercial was ever aware that what they were portraying had any basis in reality. This is an interesting commentary on how far the fabber industry has to go in order to become part of mainstream culture.) While each of the products being fabbed presents several challenges not realizable by today’s fabbers, I believe we can identify one aspect of each product that is the most difficult in terms of automated fabrication.

• Quality scuba fins are made from two different kinds of plastic, molded together. When will we be able to fab products in multiple materials, adjacent and bonded?
• A trombone is a working mechanism with moving parts that must slide over each other smoothly with tight clearance. When will fabbers be able to make products that do this without assembly?
• The hardest aspect of fabbing the water bottle in the UPS commercial isn’t the bottle, but the water inside. When will fabbers be able to incorporate fluids into the products they make?
• A genuine football is made from leather, a complex biological composite. When will fabbers be able to produce artificial materials that simulate nature?

Versatility, quality, and economy

     Let’s discuss the requirements for future fabbers that will satisfy the needs of the people in the commercial. Specialized fabbers designed to make only scuba equipment or musical instruments or beverages or leather goods clearly won’t do. The fabber of the future must be able to switch from one product to another at the will of its user. After all, the men in the lakeside lodge will likely only want a couple of pairs of swim fins a year. What they need is a fabber that will also deliver a fishing rod and reel, a rain hat, and perhaps even a six-pack of beer.

     Another requirement is that the products made by these fabbers must be as good as those you buy at the mall or UPS delivers from an Internet merchant. Nobody wants swim fins that fall apart, trombones that are off key, or footballs that pop when kicked.

Figure 9.2. A recent television commercial aired by United Parcel Service presents a vivid image of what the world could be like with fabbers readily available in people’s homes and offices. One segment in the commercial shows a young boy ordering a football online and, after peering inside expectantly for a few minutes, catching the ball as it literally pops out of the fabber. [Courtesy United Parcel Service]

     On the other hand, fabbers will be able to make products that are better than anything we can buy today. New materials and the ability to control the internal structure and composition of a product could, for example, enable fabbers to bring us scuba fins with specially resilient flippers and trombones with resonant properties to match a player’s lung capacity.

     A third requirement is that fabbers will be personal, not industrial, equipment. The UPS commercial does not show people getting products at the pick-up window of a special facility or service bureau that owns and operates complex, dangerous, or expensive equipment. Fabbers need to be compact, easy-to-use appliances that are clean and quiet enough for any modern home or office. An important element of home use, of course, is that the machines be inexpensive enough for large numbers of households to be able to afford them.

The lessons of history

     For years, I’ve been telling people that the Internet and fabbers will take the place of the Home Shopping Channel and UPS. Now, ironically, UPS has beautifully illustrated what I’ve been talking about with its recent television commercial. Perhaps this commercial creates a unique opportunity for UPS to look carefully to its own future.

     There is a lesson to be learned from mistakes of the railroad magnates in the early part of this century. Had the rail barons understood that their business was not trains, but transportation, they would have invested in trucking and airlines and thereby continued their dominant role in the 19^th-century economy into the 20^th. UPS, which recently floated the largest initial public stock offering in U.S. history, is now the world’s largest transportation company. Yet the message from its own commercial may be that UPS is not in the transportation business, but the product delivery business.

     I foresee that by the middle of the next century, more products will be delivered by fabbers than by drivers. For UPS to maintain the central role in the 21^st century economy that it has played in the 20^th will require a new level of service based on fabbers (UPS Gold?) that delivers products straight into the home or office. Never mind next-day delivery; we’re talking about I Want It Now!^™ service.

     The discussion in this article is likely to be rather controversial in some quarters. I invite feedback from readers who have comments or questions on the issues raised here or who think my predictions are anywhere between right on the money and totally offbase.

     The other articles in the New Millennium series are:

• Fabbers in Space
• Professional Fabbing at Home

     If you found this interesting, you’ll also want to read:

• Napster Fabbing—Internet Delivery of Physical Products, about the marriage of fabbers with the “peer-to-peer” Internet to provide a radical new means of product distribution.