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

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