No, that is not Makerbot Industries' problem.

They have problems at two levels. At one level is that their management isn't very nice and thus the internal culture appears to be very strained. At least if you read the comments from about 50-60 former and current employees on one of those "employee satisfaction" websites whose name escapes me at the moment (Glass Door?).

They went from a very open company embracing open source and the Maker culture, to a closed company that was about pushing products that were not mature in order to meet revenue demands from their new owners. Their new owners being one of the big names in an industry that has been defined by patenting the fuck out of everything and then holding progress back for dear life. (High end 3D printers are the ultimate razor-blade business model -- with the slight difference that the razor handle isn't exactly cheap. Ask someone who owns a high end printer and they'll be able to tell you how insanely expensive they are to run).

At the more obvious level, Makerbot are in trouble because they have made a defective product. It would have been okay if the product was still "open" so users could service the parts or upgrade components, but now you can't.

In particular they have made an extruder that fails on almost every level. From the badly designed hotend that has an entirely wrong temperature gradient, to the non existing adjustment of idler wheel pressure, the unnecessary custom designed hobbed wheel, the lack of gearing on the stepper, meaning that it is too weak to do its job (look for "tick of death"), the fact that you can't open the extruder without voiding the warranty and risk breaking off the tabs to hold it together and the various Z-axis calibration problems which means that automatic offset measurement both results in the wrong distance AND it takes more time on EVERY print than it takes to calibrate the Z-offset on a manual printer ONCE.

The upshot of this is very frequent printing malfunctions, an extruder that is only guaranteed for 200 hours of operation before it has to be replaced, and if the extruder clogs, you have to send it in to have it cleared. (Extruder clogs can happen at any time. I've had extruders clog after just 2 hours). In Norway a new extruder costs about 4000,- NOK ($510)the last time I checked. For moderate use while prototyping you need between one and two new extruders per month, plus you need a population of extruders big enough to guarantee that you have extruders on hand when sending back extruders for repair.

You can calculate how many times over a year you pay the price of a new printer in spare parts alone. The Makerbot is a fucking expensive machine to run. (Yet not as expensive as the big high end printers from 3DS, Stratasys etc)

(Of course, in real life, time is worth more, so you fix the clogged extruders yourself and void the warranty).

So no, it is not about high end versus low end processes. Most people who are in the market for FFF (FDM) printers know precisely what the process can deliver. And there are printers that reliably deliver the expected results. Makerbot's fifth generation printers are not among them.

While the Osborne effect might have been a contributor to their earlier troubles, it isn't what is ailing them now. In fact, you would have to ignore half a dozen bigger issues before you would desperately reach for the Osborne effect.

(I have a Makerbot fifth gen at work and we've gone through three extruders before just giving up. The thing doesn't work. I occasionally update the firmware and the desktop software to see if things have improved, but there really isn't that much you can do when the key problem is horrendeously inept mechanical design.

I also have a Makergear M2 at home which (in Norway) costs about half of what the Makerbot costs, and which has worked impeccably for months now. After 4 monts the extruder mount started breaking apart. So I quickly printed a new one (before it broke completely) and replaced it. It cost me about $2 and it took 90 minutes from I discovered the cracks until I had the new part mounted. Apart from that I have had no problems and have had to replace no other parts)