Hewlett-Packard to Pioneer Web-Friendly Printer

When Vyomesh Joshi, senior vice president of the Hewlett-Packard printing division, took to the stage during H.P.'s quarterly "coffee talk" and spoke to the thousands employed at the company, he knew that his speech would be cause for celebration. Joshi reported that Hewlett-Packard was experiencing significant increases in revenue, profit and market shares.

He then addressed a personal experience that he believed could potentially jeopardize the future success of the company.

He announced that one of his daughters informed him that she no longer required a printer, because it is much too complex and unnecessary to print the words that appear directly in front of her, when researching online websites. (Source: lisnews.org)

If consumers start to feel the same way as the young girl, the future would look dismal for printer-making companies.

However, the Internet era has been good to these companies thus far. Hewlett-Packard's records show that half of the printing done in homes come directly from online sources, while printing done using word processing software only accounts for about 20 percent of printouts. (Source: nytimes.com)

Vyomesh Joshi is taking the innocent conversation he had with his daughter and using it as a corporate warning. If users are finding that web pages are taking a long time to print and are wasting unnecessary amounts of ink, he fears that no more good news will be reported at future "coffee talks".

Joshi believes that most of Hewlett-Packard's challenges come not from rival printing companies, but from a change in consumer printing habits.

Several years back, when Joshi noticed that consumers were becoming enamored with new technology that allowed them to print photographs using their own personal computers, he pushed H.P. to establish a photo kiosk in retail stores all across the U.S. that specifically targeted this social change. (Source: nytimes.com)

In this way, he hopes to develop a new line of printers that will assist those struggling with the same printing problems that his daughter had experienced.

When printing online material, images often appear haphazard, with large bands of white spaces or incomplete images.

In light of this, Hewlett-Packard has purchased the small software company, Tabblo, to assist in correcting these deficiencies. Tabblo's software creates templates that reorganize the photos and text blocks on a web page to fit onto standard sizes of paper. (Source: nytimes.com)

With Tabblo, Hewlett-Packard hopes that they will be on their way to becoming the industry leader in web friendly printing.