HP continued to evangelize their "Print 2.0" strategy at last weeks Web 2.0 Summit. Sarah Milstein blogged some of the notable factoids on the O'Reilly Radar blog:
Web pages comprise 48% of printouts on home printers; word processing documents run a distant second--the reverse of just a few years ago. HP shared this revelation during an unusually good sponsored session at the Summit today. (Bonus info: HP derives usage stats from a panel of Internet-connected printers that it mines for output data much the way Nielsen monitors televisions.)
While most companies at the Summit are interested in digitizing paper processes, HP's Imaging and Printing Group--which estimates that the company has sold 400 million output devices, including printers--is looking at that 48% share of printouts and developing technologies to turn bits into atoms. It's an interesting problem because as Antonio Rodriguez, director of research and development for HP's Web-to-print team, put it, "When people created the Web, nobody thought about printing." And thus the 11-page, image-riddled printout when all you wanted was a single paragraph containing directions.
At the Summit, Vyomesh Joshi, HP's Executive Vice President for Imaging and Printing also provided predictions for the future of printing:
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.
HP is building a web-to-print platform with its "Print 2.0" strategy. The platform - a digital printing operating system - is an effective implementation of the distribute then print model. As Michael Josefowicz pointed out in an earlier post, "This is going to be one to watch closely. If it is true that digital printing is the output engine of the internet, this one could be the paradigm shifter. Should be interesting."
It will also be interesting to see how print service providers react to HP's expanding web-to-print offerings, which at first glance look to be direct competitors with print providers. But I think its safe to say that HP is enabling print: They are building tools that help people print everything to any device, anywhere.
Discussion
By Pieter Ardinois on Oct 23, 2007
Obviously HP is shifting strategy from selling printers towards delivering printing solutions. Apart from enabling print, they're also directing the way to print solutions.
By Phil Wessells on Oct 23, 2007
It's a amazing thing to see the trouble that Adobe got in for adding print links to Kinkos in Acrobat....to the point where they quickly removed the links. With HP, you have the same thing...they met with a number of small software and service providers like ourselves in the guise of learning our needs for web printing, then they stole all those ideas and implemented them directly. At the same time, they work real hard to sell us their commercial printers...it's safe to say that something has to give and in this case it's simple...we'll move further away from HP because they are making us their competitor instead of their partner.
By Sam I. on Oct 25, 2007
Does anyone remember what happened to Kodak when they launched their web-to-print designer? Why does HP think they can:
a) Do it better than Kodak
b) Not get spanked by the printing community
c) Compete against the likes of VistaPrint in the W2P space?
There are many companies that can provide the W2P off the shelf software that HP can partner with or license from or resell. Bitstream, Amazing Print, PagePath are just to list a few.
Xerox did it with XMPie, and they have done it right without a backlash.
Discussion
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