THE END USER : HP SHIFTS STRATEGIES !

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Date: Monday October 22, 2007 11:20:00 am
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    The End User: Hewlett-Packard shifts strategy on printers
     October
    , 2007 PARIS: When we think about printing, we normally call to mind
    printers. Vyomesh Joshi, on the other hand, has a vision for Version
    2.0 of printing that has more to do with lifestyle than beige boxes
    .
    Joshi,
    known widely in the industry as VJ, is executive vice president of
    Hewlett-Packard’s printing and imaging division, a $26 billion business
    that accounts for 27 percent of HP’s sales and 40 percent of its profit
    – a ratio that comes as no surprise for us consumers of high-priced
    inkjet cartridges.

    As the global market leader in both inkjet
    printers and laserjets, HP’s shifts in strategy bear watching.For the
    past two months, HP has been pushing the idea that there is not only a
    Web 2.0, but a Print 2.0 to go along with it.This is Joshi’s effort to
    ally HP with the blog-video-social scene that today’s teenage surfers
    have made of the Internet.Think about all the photos and videos that
    populate YouTube, DailyMotion and the millions of personal pages on
    Facebook and MySpace. Joshi sees them all as future printouts.Another
    way to look at the difference between Print 1.0 and 2.0 is this: The 60
    million printers HP is selling this year account for about 46 percent
    of the total market, but those printers account for only 1.6 percent of
    pages printed.”There are billions of photos being shared,” Joshi said
    in a recent interview from London. “But there’s not a simple way to
    print them.”Joshi wants to take Hewlett-Packard’s Web-based printing
    company, Snapfish, and extend its model of online services to all of
    its other print markets, like businesses, signs and professional
    publications, as well as Internet community sites.”We want to integrate
    printing into social networking behavior,” he said.
    HP last month
    agreed to a deal with Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing site, to be the
    underlying printing service there, and it has been talking to MySpace
    and Facebook about similar partnerships, Joshi said.HP also has
    developed a small application, or “widget,” that would highlight and
    print key information from Web sites, and it plans to make that widely
    available to software and Internet-site developers.The goal is a kind
    of “yearbook” printing utility.Joshi sees a print icon on every shared
    Web page or blog that would give a user what he called a
    “template-based experience.””You could, say, put all the pictures of
    this person in one collage, or take all the pictures of me and this
    friend and put them in another,” he said.”My two daughters go to the
    University of California at Berkeley. If they could print out all the
    friends they had during the year, all of the parties they went to, that
    could be a very powerful way to document and chronicle their social
    connections during their year at Berkeley.”Likewise, HP is creating
    widgets for blog sites so that you don’t have to print 150 pages of
    people’s entries and comments when all you want is one. The company has
    started working with the blog BoingBoing.But despite its dominance in
    printers, HP is coming from behind on the Internet. Snapfish, by some
    estimates, is No. 3 in the market and is just now entering the
    Asia-Pacific region. Shutterfly and Kodak’s Easyshare Gallery are
    ahead.Joshi sees high value in exposing today’s teen surfers to the HP
    brand and trying to capture their loyalty and keep it well into their
    business years.That’s why he wants to spread the HP widgetry widely
    across the Web and drive page-printing growth.What about Print 3.0?
    There, Joshi sees three-dimensional printing, printers that can “print”
    actual objects rather than pushing paper.He also sees an increasing
    role for HP as a service provider between the advertiser and retailer,
    “the link between the virtual and physical worlds.”But Hewlett-Packard
    will continue to rely on its roots in Print 1.0.”Don’t underestimate
    the power of paper,” Joshi said. “It’s the cheapest kind of storage you
    can find.”

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