I think what companies really want is manufacturing as a service, much like cloud computing economics but for physical goods manufacturing. They want the abilit

I think what companies really want is manufacturing as a service, much like cloud computing economics but for physical goods manufacturing. They want the ability to scale without building their own infrastructure, they don't want to deal with the personnel, they want to be able to lock-in only the capacity they know they will use and get a discount. The problem is that unlike cloud computing which can automatically scale, manufacturing as a service is all about people. You have to remove people from the equation to the point that the only people are debugging the machines.