Bad news for Vista means good news for competition . . . Market Splash?

Given the bad word on the web about Vista, there is an opportunity. Vista has identified a huge market - smb businesses that need a web site + business cards + collateral. It seems, according to the web, they have not delivered what they promised.

The good news is the blueprint for "Vista 2.0" is on the table. 17,000,000 users seems like the right scale. Mistaprint? Shmistaprint? Gristaprint? I'll leave the exact name for others. Just do exactly what they did, but deliver the service.

Maybe it will be Marketsplash offered at Staples + Tesco + every Indigo shop on the planet.
But don't forget the website. Every small business thinks they need one. Vista is a portal model. So was AOL. The PRinternet - ground>Cloud>print - should be alot more resilient.

Worth a click. It's not a pretty story.

read at Beyond-Print
Vistaprint’s public-relations quagmire:
"(March 13, 2009 – G. Alexander) Some customers of VistaPrint, the huge and fast-growing web-to-print supplier, have been complaining that they have been unintentionally signed up for fee-based services they didn’t want. The result has been a lot of negative publicity on the web and some class-action lawsuits. The following article summarizes our on-line investigation of the situation.

VistaPrint is by far the world’s largest web-to-print service, with a claimed 17 million customers and growing. It has achieved this position through a combination of highly effective marketing and extremely efficient operations to keep costs low. In some respects, it is a model of how printers can thrive in today’s environment. But recently, it is suffering from a spate of bad publicity."