The Web Ruins The Printer Business

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 28, 7:04AM EDT

Hewlett=Packard (HPQ) has set out on a big campaign to get Web 2.0 users to make greater use of its printers. HP’s printer business is not only large, it’s profitable. In the last quarter, according to the HPQ 10-Q, printing and imaging brought in almost $7.2 billion. The business had an operating margin of over 16%.

HPQ wants to protect that business. It has announced that it will try to get enterprises to use its printers to make hard copies of content found on the web. It is also setting up a partnership with Yahoo! (YHOO) to create a printing toolbar that will provide printing support and services. Another partnership, with Microsoft (MSFT), will encourage users of the Microsoft Live Spaces community to print their photos of the web.

According to MarketWatch: "For its business and commercial customers, H-P will launch Scitex X2 printhead technology for faster and cheaper wide-format printing, and a new Web-based imaging and printing platform called Open Extensibility, which allows printing technology developers to create industry-specific applications online with support from H-P"

It won’t matter. The bleeding for printing operations like the HPQ unit, Kodak (EK), and Lexmark (LXK) has already started. Shares in LXK are down by half over the last 52-months.

The trouble is that many businesses don’t need printers at all. Images and text can be moved around, changed, and saved using software like Word, and photo are shared on huge photo sites like Photobucket, which was recently bought by by MySpace.

Sharing and transferring text and images is in. So is storing these same things on hard drives and remote servers.

Printing is out. And, it isn’t coming back.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.