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Wednesday, June 26, 2002

Carly Cares About Image

HP has long been a serious player in consumer and office color printing. With their recent acquisition of Indigo they have also taken aim at the professional color print market. This roll-out pits HP squarely against professional photo processors. Can the professional print market be far behind?

HP completely overhauls printer biz. ZDNet Jun 25 2002 10:04AM ET [Moreover - Hewlett-Packard news]

Latent Semantic Searching for Intranets

Jenny points to an interesting note on search engines evolving to serve the weblog comunity. I wonder how these will work for a k-log community, where controlled, hierarchical access is required to protect certain company property? Stuff to watch.

Semantic Search Engine. " Semant-O-Matic may be just the thing. Its author, Maciej Ceglowski, calls it a Blog semantic search engine." [ Scripting News ] We're going to need a higher level of search engine than just Google for blogs because the semantics are so complicated. I know on my own site it's difficult to find that needle in a haystack, even with ht:dig (which I know isn't ideal, but is better than limited searching from free, third-party services). On an intranet especially, se... [The Shifted Librarian]

NAPL Study Predicts Trouble

The majority of respondents projected digital printing will continue to make inroads, with more than a quarter predicting digital will account for 30% of total revenues in 2020, and another 22.2% predicting this segment will contribute 50% or more of sales. Average run length will continue to decrease, those polled said, with 21.1% forecasting average run lengths of 1,000 or less by 2020. One area not expected to change much, however, is the way print is sold. A hefty majority of printers polled (86.1%) said that e-commerce will not replace face-to-face selling as the primary method of selling printing in 2020. [WhatTheyThink.com]

• 65 percent think more than 70% of their revenues will still come from putting ink on paper. I concur but I wonder if they realize their revenues will probably shrink by 50% to 70%?.

• 86 percent think that selling print will be primarily a face-to-face event. Print is a commodity and commodities are never sold face-to-face. The industry-wide refusal to accept this is simple self-deception. But the refusal to accept the emergence of a demand-driven market for content products -- and to grasp its impact on traditional sales, manufacturing and delivery -- is suicidal. It means they are giving no thought to competing against the future and are taking no steps to prepare for the inevitable.

• 52 percent think their average run length will be 5,000 or more in the year 2020. Only 21 percent think it will be under 1,000. R.R. Donnelley, Quebecor/World, and a few others will undoubtedly continue to crank out print runs in the millions, and specialty markets like packaging, tickets, and game/sports cards will thrive on long runs. (Notice what all these have in common -- they are hard products, not "information" products.) Direct-mail will also remain strong. But there will no longer be enough market or margin in long-run printing to support more than a handful of players.

The future of print will arrive whether the industry approves or not. All this study shows is that most of today's players won't be around to participate.

The distinction between file sharing and shared files

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This Page was last updated: 2/9/2003; 11:01:08 AM