HP Exec: Cloud (and Paper) Printing Alive and Well
I can't tell you how many times I've walked through a bookstore, and discovered, despite well-intentioned predictions that print will soon be dead, that the paper book is alive and doing very well. Ironically, the largest growing section in all visited major bookstores, since the advent of the personal computer, has been the section on computers and programming languages.
Richard Bailey, Hewlett Packard’s Vice President of Imaging and Print for the company's South Pacific region would agree with the assessment, I'm sure.
"Printing as a result of word processing is not in decline, but the rate of its growth is declining," said Bailey in an interview with New Zealand publication Reseller News. It's a game of numbers and percentages, really. "Growth of content is increasing very fast. Of that, about one third is printable. People are more careful about what they print but there is more content."
We're typing a lot more frequently than we used to these days, what with all of our social sharing, so the total body of digitally shared content has grown significantly. Blogs have continued to balloon, with short bursts of piecemeal content spreading like wildfire. Ultimately, however, on average we're simply choosing to print less of it, because there's no need to.
Popular cloud based storage and sharing tools such as note-taking app Evernote and storage solution Dropbox have contributed to the turning decline in the growth of ink hitting paper, as many have found ways to get the same important information to others without hitting the print button.
Companies like HP have been monitoring our printing (or non-printing) trends, and they've steadily been working on connecting their work and at-home printing solutions to the cloud. "The business model is evolving very rapidly," said Bailey. "There is also a lot going on in terms of photo printing, both online, in stores and at home."
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