Studies of different areas of the printing market come out at very frequent intervals. The latest one was outlined in Monday’s whattheythink.com, this being the InfoTrends/CAP Ventures study on the Global Market for Production Workflow. This is an interesting area as it covers the glue that will make all devices work efficiently, and up to now little has been done to assess this market. As is often the case a very high area of growth is defined for a specific area of the market to attract potential subscribers. In this study the high growth part of the market is for hybrid workflows for both digital and offset printing. This has a cumulative annual growth until 2008 of 98%. This is hardly surprising since, as Infotrends/CAP Ventures points out it is starting from a very small base. It is claimed such hybrid workflows only started recently, a statement I don’t necessarily agree with.

This brings me to the value of such studies. In most cases they are not read by the printing industry but by the suppliers to the industry, who are constantly looking for new business opportunities. These days most studies are well produced and are prepared utilizing good survey practices. This has not always been the case. I remember when I started in consultancy in 1985, such surveys were very new. One of the few companies doing these was InterConsult, run by the much-missed late David Goodstein. I was asked to be associated with both Seybold Publications and InterConsult at a similar time. I asked around to get opinions about which organization would be best to be associated with. This was the time when the big “buzz” technology was Corporate Electronic Publishing, which InterConsult were pushing heavily and had major studies on the subject. One of the major suppliers to the industry stated that they had spent huge amounts of money searching for the market that InterConsult’s studies showed was there, but which always appeared still to be in the future. That is one of the problems with such studies; they are all about futures and how soon those futures will come. Often the future is too far away.

It is interesting to look at selected statements from a number of recent studies to see what they are projecting for the future.