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AnonymousInactiveThe 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.” -
AuthorOctober 22, 2007 at 11:20 AM
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