Google will change the world of Print: Living Stories and the Google Phone and the elimination of print drivers.

What's next in 2010?
It's for a longer post, but what I see is a land grab in the world of QR and other 2d codes. I also believe that "distribute and print" will get much closer to a tipping point to various printernets. .

Most important is that Managed Print Services will integrate with the commercial print world to enable trackable Print in any form, at any time in any place with a minimum carbon footprint.

It's probably going to turn out to be a big deal.

Why I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing.
The world of print has been changing since Apple introduced the Mac and more importantly with Adobe launched PDF. It's been a hard decade for us printers. Contrary to popular wisdom we are probably the most adaptive manufacturing industry on the planet.

My own hypothesis is that the resiliency of our industry comes from the fact that is organized in thousands of small shops. Each is required to innovate and change to stay alive in our local niches. What works quickly spreads. What doesn't work means businesses die. Since they are small the industry overall keeps changing.

At any rate, every twenty years or so something happens outside the world of Print that crystallizes a change and creates a "tipping point." My understanding is that the newspaper strike in the 60's created that "tipping point" for cold type versus hot type. And when the newspaper barons saw the business potential of steam driven printing, the mass newspaper was born.

Consider the Google reality by Q1, 2010.
If Living Story is still not on your radar, Google search on Living Story and take a look. This morning it was confirmed that Google is launching a Google branded unlocked smart phone in January, 2010. They have already distributed thousands of them to their own people.

The disruptive business innovation is that the phone is unlocked which means it will work with any carrier. That means that the "I want to get an iPhone but I hate AT&T " problem disappears. It also means a huge shift of power away from the telco's into the hands of the cvonsumer. Since everyone from Apple to Nokia to the other telco giants are going to have to respond, it plausibly means much greater and faster growth of the smart phone market. What might be described as a "tipping point."

Meanwhile this was posted this week:

Google: Chrome OS will revolutionize how printer drivers are handled, but not in 2010

But printers? As everyone knows, printers have highly specific, unique and complicated drivers associated with them. It’s why an operating system, stripped of its driver support, weighs in at a mere fraction of its initial gigabyte weight. Google is going to have to contend with drivers when they deal with Chrome.

How are they going to do that? Google’s not saying. “”We want to get out of the business of printer drivers. All the problems related to drivers we want to go away,” Upson said. But they say they have a new, “wonderful printing solution” up their sleeves to get rid of printer drivers once and for all. But that’s long-tail. “If [printer support] is important to you, Chrome OS is not the OS for you in 2010.”