As my wife will attest, I have been contemplating 3D Printers for the last 6 years, and almost bought a Dimension printer.
So, I have had time to contemplate the strategies and goals involved. About a year ago, I created the following slide:
The mission statement should say it all.
We are on the cusp of altering how goods are delivered to society. Soon, stores will no longer need to maintain supplies of replacement parts. Soon enough, there will be a new channel of delivery of "any size" goods straight to the home.
For instance, if you accept the concept of computers becoming computationally as fast as a human than you can envision something like the following:
Imagine that in the future you have the ability to "mold" the world around you. Think for a second about what could be built in 50 years with 3D printer/mills that can build multiple specialty robotic printer/mills thanks to super-fast computers?
How? Imagine that just like CPUs now have multiple cores, families will have multiple 3D printers/mills building multiple specialty printer/mills by the dozen to accomplish tasks such as making of furniture that is the exact size for a posterior. You don't need to build larger and larger 3D printer/mills if a lot of small specialty printer/mills accomplish the same thing. Fab@home and reprap are demonstrating that we are closer to this goal than people realize.
Put another way, right now we provide the computers the tool paths which are then machined on stationary platforms. Start abstracting the problem and you may quickly realize that what is needed are ways to describe the end result and have the computers use an advanced 3D Printer / Mill to create smaller robotic printer / mills that are all programed to move themselves in 3D space creating 3D objects.
So, where on the technology / strategic curve do you plan to be??? How about your children? Build a first generation 3D Printer / Mill.