The Future of Printing

A couple of days ago I posted about an O’Reilly Radar post on printing webpages. One day later, they had another interesting post on “The Future of Printing”. It was based on a talk by HP. HP says:
Photo printing … provides a lesson: when you get the cost and quality of home printing on par with commercial printing, and you bring the speed to a reasonable level, people will switch over. He emphasized, “What happened to photos will happen to books, magazines and newspapers."
If you look around on the Web, you’ll see he’s right. O’Reilly also mentions that there are “home binding kits”, to bind your home printed books.
Furthermore HP has some interesting numbers:
Speaking of computer printers, Joshi noted that while 70% of desktop machines are connected directly to printers, only 30% of laptops are. And laptops are gaining on desktops. So HP is shifting their business model from printers to printing, from unit to pages. Which means that HP is heading toward a printing-agnostic future in which they're just as happy if we print our photos, books, magazines and newspaper at home, at retail businesses or via the Web.
Very interesting. Wonder what this implies for a business-to-business vendors like Xerox, Ricoh, and Océ?

Comments

  1. Ardi XIVNovember 9, 2007 at 8:56 AM

    HP's the first, and the biggest retail provider of print related products.
    As a print provider, working with Océ, Xerox and HP products, I have the feeling that they still don't get the full picture. They are trying to sell their closed software packages by taking advantage of the unawareness of new technology amongst their clients. I hope HP will trigger the global need to embrace new, open and social technology.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Please leave a comment! Just log in using one of the formats and if you want me to get back to you. Otherwise comment anonymously.

Popular posts

Keep the Intranet Small

Image
This tweet by Jonathan Phillips ( @digitaljonathan ) triggered to finalize this post, that's been burning in my draft box. I've always been intrigued by how unsuccessful many intranets are. And there are all kinds of good reasons for intranet failure. One of the things that is hardly ever mentioned is: Shouldn't the intranet be smaller? Usually intranets are huge. Lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of content. With complex navigation. The intranet  evaluation surveys almost always show employees only use the news page and people finder. But still we build and maintain nice big intranets. Not only stats point to smaller intranets. There are others reasons as well. I came up with a few. If you have more, just leave a comment. Here's my list: -            user requirements: users don't require large intranet -            search/navigation: searching and navigating a small ...
Read more

Enterprise 2.0 Research

Image
There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study? Goals of the study To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia; To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy; To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business; To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers; To analyse an...
Read more

Innovation in Turbulent Times

Image
I love reading articles about innovation. And every now and then you read one that is very interesting. "Innovation in Turbulent Times" by Rigby, Gruver, Allen (in HBR, June 2009) is one of them. This article takes fashion companies as an example for continuous, year-by-year innovation. And how successful fashion companies are usually led by two people: a left-brainer and a right-brainer. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson." They extend this to show that successful non-fashion companies have the same kind of leadership. And this kind of leadership is usually also characterized by a long-term relationship. I think this concept can also be extended to teams and projects as well. More often than not, people are good at one or the other: thinking up great concepts or ideas, or, making them. In teams and projects we can learn from this as...
Read more