iBOM part 3 – Reinventing Production

So in this new world of iBoms and meta-iBoms what changes? Well pretty much everything, electronics construction gets dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. Open Hardware production becomes much more simplified and distributed. But why should Octopart do such a thing? Well they could pull a Google on the Electronics supply chain for a start, that’s got to be worth something? We get great footprints and metadata, our opensource tools (Kicad/Geda) would improve significantly I would expect it would be in the interests of say an Octopart to invest into those tools and help devolop them. I could even imagine Octopart buying Github and integrating project management into the whole iBOM, pretty soon it would mean that the buyers would start stearing the component manufacturers/vendors indicating whats needed to be made to make our lives easier rather than the dictorial arrangement we currently have with them. It will also change how things are manufactured in general, with the combination of this and 3D printing technologies (RepRap et al) things could be produced nearer their destination rather than being shipped half the way around the world as they currently are (highly in efficient). That sort of change could make huge differences to the future economies of not just electronics but manufacturing itself.

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