Observations New Horizons in Printing

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, June 2008

New Horizons in Printing


One of the joys of being a printer industry “observer” is the combination of steady predictable trends mixed with the serendipitous nature of much news and development in the industry. While 2007 was hard to beat for momentous milestones for industry stalwarts including HP, Kodak, and Xerox, and attention-gaining surprises from newcomers Silverbrook/Memjet and Zink, 2008 has had its share of interesting developments as well. As we reach the year’s half-way point, I first think about some of the “little things” that I’ve seen and learned, including a delightful match of customer needs and industry capabilities I’m calling “media printing,” as well as a variety of other emerging technologies that have been lumped under the biggest of possible “printing” umbrellas and may grow to be of great importance someday.

At the risk of giving away some trade secrets about just how to be an industry observer, one of my methods is following company and trade communications (of course, The Hard Copy Observer tops this list). But I also like the serendipity of entering “printer” and “printing” into the search bar of Google News a number of days per week and just seeing what pops up.

In 2008 so far, in addition to media printing (more to follow), I’ve come across drug printing, 3D printing, organ printing, and electronics and solar cell printing, to name a few. Many use ink jet technologies in one form or another and provide a glimpse at many new horizons open to printing and print technologies.

• Drug printing is a form of the long-established ink jet industrial marking business, which HP has entered via its Specialty Printing Division. It is more than just printing a few characters of a cryptic code on a pill now though and includes images and variable data. The wonders of digital printing long ago came to the pharmaceutical industry, but now it’s the pills themselves that are being printed upon. (see "Drug Printing".)

• 3D printing and organ printing are also both variations on ink jet technology. 3D printing has actually been around for a long time and, as I always thought, it involves adding a “Z” axis to “X,Y” printing devices, and replacing the ink in a typical printing solution with a hardening compound that, when dry, hardens as a stable 3D object. 3D printing is grouped under the “rapid prototyping” technologies and is becoming a practical way to produce parts, competing with more established machine shop techniques. It’s hard to put a machine shop on a space station though, which is the somewhat far-out promise of 3D printing. With organ printing, or more generally “bioprinting” ink jet applications, a similar tack is used, but the printer jets biological materials (cells) to create a replacement organ or other body part for human patients. (see "Organ Printing".)

• Solar cells for converting sunlight into electricity are another important type of “cell” that is being printed—both with offset and ink jet techniques. Electronics printing (using print technologies to create circuit boards) has been with us for some time, and now it’s being applied to the emerging category of solar cells and panels. (see "Solar Cell Printing".)


With that range of technologies in mind, it was interesting to be introduced first-hand to the capabilities of a neighboring company here in Idaho: Gold Link Media. Specializing in “distributing content using the latest digital media solutions” per the firm’s Web site, Gold Link Media features printing capability for CD and DVD media that employs heat transfer film images produced by a Xeikon digital typesetter at CDigital Markets LLC of Baltimore, MD. Digital technology for this type of printing favors short runs and offers variable data printing, just as in more conventional digital printing. Gold Link Media uses a custom Trekk Equipment device along with the film supplied by CDigital to complete the media printing process at the same time that the firm puts data on the disk and the packaging.

Despite overall satisfaction and strong customer acceptance of its current media printing solution, Gold Link Media founder and president David Fish has his eye on emerging upstream printing developments that involve, yes, ink jet technology. For example, Tapematic, of Ornago, Italy, is touting a six-color UV-curable ink jet solution.

And one irony of the technology history of this category? Indigo Systems (Observer, 9/99), long before being acquired by Hewlett-Packard (NYSE HPQ) in 2002, had an initial foray into this market with its Omnius card press. As we watch HP “turning over many stones” in the industrial and graphics-arts markets in search of continued growth in its printer business, may we perchance see the firm’s presence again in this space?

Solar cells, DVDs, kidneys and spleens? What’s next for printing? Keep reading, and I’ll keep observing!

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Observations A Look at XPS and Printing—Two Years Out

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, August 2008

A Look at XPS and Printing—Two Years Out

A few weeks back, while prowling some favorite Web sites, I ran into a blog post that triggered a stream of memories and thoughts. It was on another printer industry blog (yes, there are others besides jimlyonsobservations.com), and its subject included some memories of the Seybold Seminars. Posted on the PrintCEO blog and titled “1996 Is Calling, and So Is Seybold San Francisco”, Patrick Henry of Liberty or Death Communications writes about uncovering some show material from the 1996 Seybold Seminars held in San Francisco. In fact, reading Pat’s experiences with his “find” made me reminisce about my own discovery about three years ago, which was the inspiration for my premier column for The Hard Copy Observer that appeared in the December 2005 issue. But that’s another story, and also, rather than my recounting here his excellent recollections about Seybold 1996, I highly recommend reading Pat’s post.

As I enjoyed first reading the blog entry and its associated comments, it was also memory-jogging for me, with respect to another year for the Seybold show and a somewhat more recent column in the April 2006 issue: “Microsoft’s XPS—After All These Years, More Mumbo-Jumbo?”. In 1989, a monumental confrontation between Adobe (NASDAQ ADBE) and the odd-couple combination (then as now) of Apple (NASDAQ AAPL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT) occurred at the Seybold Seminars in San Francisco and, having attended that event, I couldn’t help but resurrect a comparison between that brouhaha and the boiling XPS/PDF feud of 2006 once again pitting Adobe and Microsoft in a battle over file formats. (A footnote to my April 2006 column, by the way, warned of an impending schedule slip. The column had been originally written in what was thought to be the impending shadow of the XPS introduction, inextricably tied to the new Microsoft Windows operating system Vista and its anticipated mid-year debut. Vista and XPS finally made it out of the barn in late 2006 or early 2007, depending on the definition of official first-shipped dates.)

Now more than two years later, just how did that battle ensue once the marketplace had a chance to decide? As a general reaction, it would be easy to equate the XPS introduction aftermath with the Shakespeare play, “Much Ado About Nothing,” but let’s take a little deeper look for some evidence.

As goes Vista, so goes XPS?

First off, the XPS association with Vista, the product, and Microsoft, the company, cannot be helping, if only purely from psychological standpoints. Vista has been called many things, most not particularly favorable, including Microsoft’s “New Coke” by Forrester Research, as recently reported in Larry Dignan’s blog, ZDNet’s Between the Lines. And Microsoft’s overall corporate prowess seems deeply wounded, as this year’s machinations around its intended Yahoo! (NASDAQ YHOO) acquisition illustrate.

Though Yahoo! seems to be clearly the real loser in the ongoing fiasco, Microsoft’s inability to close the deal, let alone the strategic weaknesses revealed initially in the company’s perceived need to acquire the former search leader, contributes to egg on its corporate face. And even Office 2007, the seemingly innocent by-stander in all of it, would seem to have a bad rap, suffering from “if it’s not broke don’t fix it” syndrome, including, annoying new file formats that confound transferability of its files and require users to “think before they save” or suffer the consequences. The significance of this issue is underscored by the fact that among the top downloads at Microsoft’s software site, the “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats” regularly ranks near or at the very top of the list.

With that said, a look at the archives of The Hard Copy Observer provides a perspective directly relevant to our industry. Not surprisingly, an electronic search of the Observer archives (in PDF format, ironically) finds multiple mentions of XPS in virtually every issue since the Fall of 2005. And while most mentions in those earlier months, an example being my April 2006 column, centered on the capabilities, the controversy, and the early partners including the mostly smaller firmware and testing companies, more recent mentions include OEMs and their new printers and MFPs that include native XPS in their products. Canon, Konica Minolta, Océ, Toshiba, and Xerox (NYSE XRX) show up with XPS-capable entries, with just a quick random sample of the references over the last year, and Epson and HP (NYSE HPQ) have also endorsed XPS.

So there’s definitely an XPS footprint in our industry. But it would also appear that no one has lost out to XPS—inclusion of XPS compatibility would not appear to have bumped any other language or format off the list. But it’s an interesting situation: a powerhouse like Microsoft rocking the boat, for some ostensibly good reasons (like open source), and all the players reacting, but only as much as absolutely necessary for their given situations. And, by the way? The PDF open standard was published July 1, 2008!

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December Observations Spin off Spinning – Looking Ahead to “The HP Printing Company”

December 2012 Observations

Observations: Spin-off Spinning – Looking Ahead to “The HP Printing Company”

My former employer, printing and imaging giant Hewlett Packard, has been the source of much bad news over the last few years. CEO turnover, over-priced acquisitions, and strategic stumbling have all made the company, started by “Bill and Dave” in 1939, the subject of much derision and speculation. And a tumbling stock price has made the ongoing crisis very real for share-holding employees and retirees.

HPQ stock price since 2000

The stock price, bouncing off a decade low in recent weeks, has been buoyed in recent days by calls for breaking up the company and rumors of corporate vultures like Carl Icahn circling (see "Rumors of Carl Icahns interest..." ). The accompanying speculation makes one ponder a future with an independent HP Printing Company in our industry’s midst.

Could once-proud HP, founding firm of Silicon Valley, really be in Icahns sights?

The most recent and most severe downward spiral began about a year and half ago with news that had little to do with the printing side of the house. The August 2011 announcements included a proposed spinoff of HP’s PC business and the cancellation of the firm’s short-lived TouchPad tablet computer (a would-be Apple iPad competitor that barely made a blip in the market) and exit from their WebOS investment, acquired via Palm in 2010. The simultaneous large acquisition of UK-based Autonomy, a provider of infrastructure software for the enterprise, was widely criticized as being too pricey at the time. (By November of 2012, HP management had accused the acquired company’s management of accounting improprieties, which led to that over-priced deal, seemingly discovering that the price was too high, well more than a year after the rest of the world caught on!)

That series of decisions in August 2011 was not at all well received by investors and industry watchers, lead to the departure of another CEO, Leo Apotheker, the third top executive to make an exit since 2006. Apotheker was replaced by current CEO Meg Whitman, who reversed the PC spin-off idea, and moved the former Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) under the company’s PC business and the leadership of Todd Bradley, simultaneously bidding adieu to “retiring” long-time printer chief Vyomesh Joshi.

And now, the world seems antsy about HP and its ability to turn things around. Some believe this situation to be a classic case of negative synergy – where the sum of the parts following a breakup of the firm would have more value than the current whole. According to some, we could see an independent HP Printing Company in the near future.

So what of a spin-off of the printer group? A little more history is worth noting at this point as this is not the first time the idea has surfaced. In 2002, former CEO Carly Fiorina successfully completed the acquisition of Compaq Computer. Before the deal was done one of the founder’s sons, Walter Hewlett, led a bitter proxy fight against the merger and suggested then that the IPG organization could fare better and bring higher value on its own (see “Hewlett suggests HP spin offprinting unit”, ). At that time, spin-offs for HP were hardly unknown – its original business in test and measurement products was successfully spun out, as Agilent, in the 1990s.

Spinning off HPs Printing Group is not a new idea

The printer group, the former IPG, has been out of the wake of most of the more scandalous news in recent years. Its acquisitions have been smaller and more sensible (I am thinking of Indigo – in the same time frame as Compaq – followed by Scitex Vision and MacDermid, which greatly bolstered the company’s successful upward market expansion into commercial printing). Negative numbers, at least in year-to-year compares, started to show up during in the 2008/2009 recession, especially in consumer printing. Since then, the portfolio has been a mixed bag, with Whitman’s assertion that print is in a “secular decline” becoming a headline-maker earlier this year. (See "HPs Big Problem.").

But those of us who make a living following the industry see definite promise and bright spots in HP’s printing and imaging business, even beyond the aforementioned commercial business, where the company has found growth by replacing traditional analog-based methods with modern, digital printing. In the enterprise space particularly, HP has a line of spiffy new monochrome and color MFPs and some new and expanding solutions based around document management and workflow improvements, as the worlds of physical and electronic documents become ever more integrated. Ironically, these solutions, branded under the “Flow” moniker, along with the print-and-scan hardware, are based in large part on solutions from Autonomy, the now-much-maligned acquisition target of 2011.

I personally think the new company would be formidable. HP’s investments and capabilities in its printing and imaging business have continued over the years, and more “autonomy” (ouch – forgive me!) for the business could do nothing but good for the proposed spin-off’s highly qualified but currently beleaguered marketing and technical teams. And who knows – if they need a CEO, I know a recently unemployed, but highly experienced executive who goes by the initials “VJ!”

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April 2013 Observations Please consider the environment

By Jim Lyons

The "Please Consider the Environment Before Printing" message seems ever more popular in 2013

Happy Earth Day 2013!

Covering the printing and imaging industry via this Blog for the past seven-and-counting years has led to a number of "green" or environmentally-themed posts.  So today, in addition to wishing my readers a happy 2013 Earth Day, I had some fun looking back on those Observations columns and updating them for the current times.

One of my favorites came in 2008 when I did a little research on a new message which was starting to show up on the bottom of certain emails I was receiving. It was “Please Consider the Environment Before Printing” (or some variation), with or without a green-tree graphic. I did some basic research (see below) and found it was quite popular on Google, with just under 1,000 hits for the complete (and in quotes) phrase, "Please Consider the Environment before Printing this Email".

Two years ago, I updated those numbers (see "April Observations: Print More E-mails – Save the Earth") as well as took on a different angle linking green and printing - that being the idea that selective printing was actually GOOD for the environment, as managed forests producing paper could only remain and prosper if there was demand for print, and paper. The post was based on a Wall Street Journal editorial, and the work by the organizations in question goes on today. But the related research I did showed that our phrase in question, "Please Consider the Environment before Printing this Email", then generated nearly a half-million hits, a 500x increase over three years.

Today, tracking that search data (and as the illustration shows at the top of the piece), we have seen another increase, to 2.5 million hits for the phrase. Impressive growth to say the least, in these times of printing and paper usage being threatened from all sides. With so much email (speaking from my own day-to-day experiences) being generated and consumed via mobile devices, it is amazing to think back to office workers who would routinely print each and every email they received!

BLOG NOTES

I feel I need to address two points for clarification, for my readers. My March Observations (see "Looking Back on the Future of Printing") promised a follow-up in April. Due to the upcoming Earth Day theme, I should have realized Id really be updating in May, so stay tuned - I have some great stuff on the current state of printing the news (and other content).

And also, after 88 monthly "Observations" columns appearing elsewhere (beginning with the beloved but now extinct Hard Copy Observer), as well as right here at Jim Lyons Observations, I am going it alone for now. But stay tuned on this one also - for a new place to find it in the coming months. And as always, you can find it, along with other (non-monthly?) Observations, right here.

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Observations Do printers fit with this new “Free!” thing

by Jim Lyons

The Hard Copy Observer, March 2008

Do printers fit with this new Free! thing?

Chris Anderson, author, journalist, and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, is on to a new trend. His cryptic label for the trend is simply "Free," and as I read about it and sorted through all the associated comments and discussions, I had that familiar feeling that once again an important new technology and social trend was on the horizon, but what wasn’t as clear is whether printers get to "come outside and play."

By way of context, Anderson is the author of the famous article, "The Long Tail", that originally appeared in Wired magazine in October 2004, and which he then developed into a full-length book which was published in 2006 entitled, "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More." Anderson also has a blog, thelongtail.com, where he has been introducing readers to his new ideas, which center around the tremendous growth in "free" products and services and the business models that rationalize and support them. He is also working on a new book for publication in 2009, and the cover story of the March 2008 Wired magazine features a 6,000-word preview entitled, "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business."

Coincidentally, this business and marketing trend was included, by name, in the Lyra 2008 Imaging Symposium. Steve Hoffenberg, director of Consumer Imaging Research for Lyra, hosted a panel and gave a presentation called "Beyond Prints: Evolving Photo Printing Opportunities," where he used Long Tail concepts to describe myriad personalized specialty items now available to photo-loving consumers—think t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, and mouse pads, among others.

With that connection in mind, it is fascinating that Anderson’s Wired article starts out in similar fashion to a presentation from the Lyra 2005 Imaging Symposium. In that speech, entitled "Digital Imaging Business Model Evolution," the speaker took on the razor-and-blades model that is so often used in the printing and imaging industry with respect to the way printers and supplies are priced. He compared the hard copy business, literally, to the real razor-and-blades business and its new product introductions and price points over the last few decades, as implemented by Gillette, the industry leader.

In Anderson’s article, though, he has gone even farther back, and in fact leads off his piece with a description of the company’s namesake, King Gillette, and the original innovation of razor blades as an improvement over the incumbent straight razor near the turn of the 20th century. Starting with the real innovation, business-wise, of the idea of giving away the razor and selling the blades, Anderson uses examples such as free cell phones and their monthly service plans and video-game consoles and the games themselves, as high-tech examples that are carrying on the legacy of Gillette. Regrettably, Anderson never quite brings printers and supplies into the discussion, which prompted memories of our industry being left out of major press stories as described in my recent Observations column. Being aware of this "free" trend, and representing the printing and imaging industry, I am here to “elbow in” on this newest phenomenon, and as Anderson points out in a February 25, 2008, post on his Long Tail Web site, "This is the start of my explorations of the world of FREE, not the end."

Some historical industry anecdotes of our own help make our case for the inclusion of the printing and imaging industry in the "free" discussion. One instance that comes to my mind involves Dell and the firm’s entry into the printer business with a lineup of competitively priced ink jet and laser printers (Observer, 4/03). Not long after Dells printer launch, industry rumblings surfaced about Dell PC customers receiving mysterious "free" ink jet printers with the computer shipments they ordered through Dell’s direct channel. It was surmised by some that this was not a mistake, but rather an effort to build an ink-hungry installed base of Dell printers. After all, if it makes sense to follow a strategy of selling a low-end ink jet printer and taking a small loss, offering "free" printers is really only just taking a little bit more of a loss.

While I have no data to know if Dells practice of "free" printers continues, the next closest thing is the common free printer, after rebate" offer. These offers are not hard to find and are typically included with the purchase of a desktop PC, laptop computer, or digital camera.

Reflecting on our business, what is the future of the practice of free or nearly-free "cross-subsidized" printer sales, in the parlance of Anderson? No less formidable industry players as Kodak and Xerox made well-documented attempts to reverse the balance, with higher-priced printers and lower-priced supplies during the last year, and have so far experienced mixed results, at best. Other companies, continue to struggle with how to participate in the very low end of the ink jet and laser printer markets. And while the question of whether to participate at all remains, the attraction seems to be nearly irresistible over the long term for many printer OEMs.

Bringing the discussion back to Anderson and his "Free" theories, the article goes much farther in describing and categorizing various free-enabling business models and asserts that the cross-subsidized razor-and-blades idea is only the beginning. As applied to Gillette, Anderson looks ahead and speculates: "It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)" In fact, this remark brings us to a hypothetical question for the printing and imaging industry that is maybe not quite so theoretical as it used to be: With nearly-free toner and/or ink to go along with nearly free printers, on what other profit-generating business can the hard copy industry base its future?
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Links
jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2006/07/observations-razor-and-blade.html
techdirt.com/articles/20080202/210638158.shtml
techdirt.com/articles/20080225/183427355.shtml
techdirt.com/articles/20080222/174809327.shtml
wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
thelongtail.com/
wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

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