Who's driving MarketSplash? Is it HP or Staples?

In a facilitated user network commercial model, the links are catalysts for creating better customer experience at lower prices with easier transactions. Better customer experiences at lower price with easier transactions is the operational definition of creating value.

So, maybe a better way to look at HP/MarketSplash might be as HP/Staples/MarketSplash. i have a feeling that the best way to look at it is Staples/HP/MarketSplash. Staples bought Corporate Express a while ago. Now it's called, E-Procurement & Outsourcing Staples Print Solutions.

E-Procurement & Outsourcing Print (sort of =) BPO (sort of =) MPS (sort of =) Print Service Distributors (sort of =) Print Broker. All different names for the same network functionality. Aggregate customers link them to manufacturers and manage the logistics.

Trade printer (sort of=) CRD (sort of=) PSP (sort of =) Print Output Node in printernet jargon.

NowDocs expands its SaaS Print Solutions Set -
from Printing Industry News from WhatTheyThink: "'Cross-Wind enables us to easily distribute, via the Web, specifications for an order, allowing numerous suppliers to respond electronically with a pricing quote and delivery date. Our buyers can then instantly compare prices and select a supplier, ensuring a cost-effective and quick response to our valued customers.' Maggie Witt, Director, E-Procurement & Outsourcing Staples Print Solutions (formerly Corporate Express)"

The Mac GUI, Adobe Postscript and Erasable Paper

Back in the 1990's I scrapped together some money from my print brokerage. Since the only thing I really knew about was printing, I bought three stocks for the IRA with a buy and hold strategy, I was too busy earning money to get involved in the casino.

The three stocks were Adobe, Apple and Xerox. It seemed so natural at the time. Sooner or later, I figured someone would figure out how to fix the silly accounting of Xerox. I was not disappointed when Anne started running the store. I was sure that once that was out of the way, it would turn out that I was really smart.

Two out of three are not bad. I'm doing ok with Adobe and Apple. On Xerox I've seen 66% of my investment disappear. The irony of course is that the GUI and Postscript were invented at Xerox Parc.

I still feel ok about Xerox over the long haul. But while erasable paper is lost somewhere in the Xerox pipeline, I did a google search on Ricoh + Erasable paper. Try it yourself and see what you get.

I'm still betting that erasable paper will scale in MPS through innovation done by some team of engineers and product designers in India or New Zealand, maybe living at Fuji Xerox , or maybe cut loose from PARC.

What a shame for my home team.

Go Mets!

Does InfoPrint have PSPs?

This is not a rhetorical question. I haven't seen any stories about how XYY company did the clicks for either the first or second transpromo experiments. I might have missed them. But in case I haven't, does the following make sense?

added 10:23 EST
It turns out that I got this wrong. The answer is yes, Infoprint does have PSPs. But I have to say with all those innovations centers doing the experimental work, it sounds like they may get into a HP/MarketSplash kerfuffle. If the proven innovations are then spun out to InfoPrint 5000 installations, it could work together nicely. If not . . .

In an facilitated user network commercial model, the PSP is the Vendor's partner, not the vendor's customer. Customers are the people that bring new money to the table. Selling boxes is not a profit center. It's an investment in infrastructure - like laying the tracks or fiber optic cables. When the trains start running or the TV gets turned on, the investment can start to pay off.

Printers print. For Ricoh/IBM, my take is that Ricoh makes money with toner. IBM makes money by selling Cloud computing.

Free advice to Oce
Keep a very close eye on this.

Free advice to HP
Tell Wall Street your strategy for defending the computer business from Cloud computing?

Free advice to everyone else
Money invested in evangelizing transpromo is building a market you are not going to own. Lots of players lots of competition.

What has been done, will be done. There is nothing new under the sun.

Has the Monetization Really Started? -
@ Seeking Alpha:

"We are starting to see the Fed get serious about monetizing the debt. The talking is over and the direct impact on the market is now under way. At $12 billion in purchases every week, this means that for the next 25 weeks or so, the Fed will be entering the Treasury market acquiring more securities. And, this doesn’t include the provision to purchase mortgage-backed securities in large dollar amounts."

Since the time that the UK invented public debt, it's been the same story. Either the real economy will revive to absorb the monetization or it won't. If it doesn't the value of the dollar will go down. If it does and global economic development stalls the value of the dollar will go up. If global economic development grows, the value of the dollar will be relatively stable. But it's not going back to the old days.

The long cycle is that the center of the world economy is moving back to Asia, after a 400 year interlude in the West. The monopoly of energy-as-oil is starting to fragment. The Euro Centric vision supported by European currencies is starting to evolve into whatever is going to be next.

It's just common sense, systematically applied.

The wisdom of independent MPS and Printernet Publishing

There are no new ideas. Just different implementations of common sense.

From Phillips Supply House, est. 1893. The largest dedicated supplier of Digital Equipment in North Central Pennsylvania.

I am working with an outside print organization right now to move one of my customers to the model of 1 to 10 desktop/workgroup printer, 10 to 100 workgroup printer, 100 to 500 CRD printer, and over 500 to web press.

And the next day,

This seems to be the direction the "print for pay" world is going. Most of my customers are small enough that they do not have requirements of the magnitude this article addresses, and the ones that are, are sending out their bigger jobs to in-house press plants, or over the web to print shops already. The "design on the fly" and ability to change things on the web, then submit to print, is pretty cool!

Imagine if this becomes the common model for Independent MFD or MFP and MPS business people. It will be interesting to see if this model gets some discussion at their upcoming conference.

The rest of this post is just my evolving thought model to try to clarify how PSPs and Vendors can act in a changing environment.

'Printernet publishing'
The sustainable advantage is that while publishing on the web is cheap and easy, publishing in print requires printers. A printer can be a machine or a machine + intelligence. The particular kind of intelligence depends on the length of the run and the print product being produced. (see the quote above).

A "printernet" would create a new medium. This new medium would allow global print manufacture and distribution of almost any quantity of Print product, in a couple of days. Consider the daily capacity of PSPs and multiply by the number of PSPs. Consider also the low carbon footprint required.

'Printernet publishing' would enable message makers in government, corporate, education, health to communicate with everyone fast enough to make a difference.

This is not a new idea. It's just applying common sense at a global scale. It's always been, and will always be, about the right information in the right form at the right time for the right person.

Yikes! They're talking about Oce at Harvard!

To be clear, I do not claim any ownership of the phrase printernet. They are using it in Australia, and a recent commenter pointed out that it is listed in the Urban Dicitonary as of 2006. Just more evidence that there are no new ideas, just new mashups and better implementation of the old ideas.

Meanwhile, perhaps the notion is going to mainstream, a little sooner rather than later. The Nieman Journalism Lab is hosted at Harvard. The title of the post is A giant digital copier: individuated news, Océ-style. The dateline is March 26.

Ok, Oce's equipment is not exactly a copier. I would probably call it a newspaper Print Output Node. But that's inside Print language. But when the folks at Harvard get printers on their radar something is going on.

Meanwhile, earlier in the week in my column at PBS/mediashift, I said,

Imagine networked desktop publishing where the desktops and printers are spread throughout the whole world. Publishing means newspapers, newsletters, books and posters in mass market quantities, but versioned and personalized for specific communities and individual users.

From the point of view of a writer, it would be easier than ever to see your story in print. If you're a publisher, it means an efficient way to move from the web to print products that can attract advertising. If you are an advertiser, it means one more mass media with a low carbon footprint, unparalleled reach and a clear way to know if it's working. For the citizen, it means the world as bookstore.

In the jargon of networks, this so-called "printernet" can have the same benefits as the Internet -- massive parallel manufacturing with standards-based interfaces, real time production information and easy access for everyone. Each printer -- the combination of the machinery and the intelligence that manages the machinery -- is a print output node.

To find out where America's culture is going, read the Time Magazine cover story

Just saw Kurt Anderson on MSNBC. He said something about the American Character, by which he really means the culture, is divided between the "Ben Franklin strand" and some other strand that I missed. As a printer, I've always been a Ben Franklin wanna be. Mostly it was a goal rather than an accurate description.

Here's the link to the Time Magazine Cover Story. The End of Excess: Is This Good for America?

Wouldn't it be cool if someone could talk to someone at Time, Inc. to get the rights to re publish this story on someone's printernet.

Xerox? Oce? HP? The Ace Group? Consolidated? A Xerox Premier Partner? AlphaGraphics? Fedex Kinko? Staples? . . . or will it be a three person start up in Australia, New Zealand, Mumbai, or Bejing.

It would be a nice thing for the PSPs to send to their suspects, prospects, customers and clients to get more work in the door. Much better than throwing away more money on "educating the customer or educating the PSP about how to make money from VDP or about programs that if they had the focus to implement, they've already implemented them.

More on MSM being hosed and the opportunity for the Printernet

Recent conversations at the top of the various pyramids are usually complicated because no one wants to face the fact that their power is disappearing.

Here's how it plays out for publishers.

From William F. Aicher:
. . . I want to discuss a bit the bigger point the publishing industry doesn’t seem to be getting - they no longer hold the keys to the kingdom.

For hundreds of years now, the barrier to entry to create a written work that can easily be duplicated and made available to the masses has relied upon a very closed system, with a very high cost of entry. During those times logistical issues greatly limited the amount of content that could be created (how many printing presses exist, for example) or how many books could really be sold (how many bookstores could exist, and how much shelf space was available). So it was extraordinarily important for any publisher to make very discriminate decisions as to what books they would publish and ultimately attempt to get onto a store’s shelf. During this time they were the tastemakers and ultimately responsible for the continued desire for people to want to consume the written word."

The printernet opportunity
Publishing on the web is now easy. Publishing in the real world is still hard. The Printernet can make it easy. Every company that can build links to the printernet will be in a nice sustainable low margin/ huge margin business.

HP got the clicks on Printernet Publishing for Magazines . . . and some free advice for Xerox

Now if HP would only spin off it's Indigo and toner business, I could add that new organization to my 401K.

Until they do that, there is no way I want to figure out how they are going to make that Compaq purchase work. Given that Cisco is going into the server business, that whole thing looks like a loser to me. Add to that Google, IBM and Amazon in the Cloud business, I can't see how HP is going to get any margins in that line of work.

Anyway,

You can find out what the Ace Group has to say about printernet publishing for magazines at OnDemand. They still describe it as VDP blablabla. Did you ever meet anyone aside from a vendor who is excited by VDP? It's database publishing. It has always been database publishing. It will continue to be database publishing.

And just a little snarky note: "the secret to completing the VDP puzzle" is to find the customers who want to buy it. Everything else is just technology. PSP's have always been awesome at installing technology when a customer is willing to pay for the product. It's why I love PSPs.

Time, date and location – 12:00-12:50, Tuesday, March 31, Room 201B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center

Session title – "Completing the VDP Puzzle: Your Guide to Successfully Implementing VDP Capabilities"

Speaker – Val DiGiacinto, vice president of sales and partner, The Ace Group, New York City

Anyone else seeing a pattern?
Indigo sales have been going pretty well + Consolidated bought 36 Indigos and I assume have them up and running at their multiple locations + the Ace Group is producing "mine" on it's Indigo presses + MarketSplash has gone live.

Makes one wonder where the presses are located that will fulfill orders from MarketSplash. Consolidated? The Ace Group? Indigo PSP's around the country? I'm pretty sure it's not going to be the super efficient gang run offset they do over at VistaPrint.

I'm thinking Consolidated sales people are out there now looking for magazines to printernet publish. Meanwhile, the Ace Group already has the track record with Time, Inc and American Express. Plus they're in New York where all the big publishers are still located.

So... what might it look like?
I'm still seeing the same thing:

HP is trying to grab the whole enchilada. Consumers/mSB with MarketSplash. Magazines with printernet publishing on widely distributed Indigos. Enterprises with HP printers which most IT people love. If they connect the enterprise to commercial print, MPS morphs into BPO.
BPO is one of the backbones of the printernet.

What about everyone else?
Ricoh/IBM will fight it out with HP. Ricoh/IBM have the lead with massive scale Transpromo at the CMO level. As far as I can tell they're not interested in SMB.

Oce will continue their domination of books. If they can make a deal with Kodak, they could dominate the newspaper market as it moves to mass customization and hyper local newspapers. Kodak meanwhile could increase their lead in heat set web offset, moving from newspapers to lights out manufacturing for short run magazines.

Cannon? KM? Kyocera? I don't have a clue, except to think they are still trying to figure out what's their next moves.

And that leaves my home team, Xerox.

Free advice for Xerox
Education, education, education, government.
Education is the Global Defense Industry for the next era. Education means global security. Global security is job one for everyone. Plus instead of firing people you could be helping them make a transition into education. It's cheaper for us stock holders and a better way to reduce those pension liabilities. If GM can offer their people a buy out, you should be able to do the same.

1. Forget about pushing color.
Everybody has color. Color is a commodity. Everyone expects color. After a gezillion dollars invested, everyone gets it. WikiBooks (the emerging replacement for textbooks) are printed in Black only. The cheapest, fastest way to get information is in Black only. Black only is much more sustainable. The Nuvera's, by all accounts, are awesome machines.

Sure, the "growth in color" produces some nice numbers for Wall Street, but those folks are getting more irrelevant every day. Once the betting stops, the new game is sustainable revenue and dividends. The market will probably hover at around 7,500 to 8,500 for a couple of years now that the funny money has disappeared. No funny money, no big increases in stock price.

2. Focus on the perfect binding piece.
Find the PSP's in your network that have perfect binding functionality. Work out a really good deal, from the POV of the PSP's, to integrate perfect binding into their Print Output Nodes. While Oce's machines are good for central location distribution of books, Nuvera's + perfect binding could win for Distribute and Print in many locations. Every school district should be printing their own WikiBooks. Every University in-house should be doing the same.

3. Get in touch with the Wikipedia Foundation and PediaPress.com.
Do a good deal so they have easy access to the Xerox printernet. The software is open source. Everybody loves Wikipedia. They need the revenue. Xerox has the distributed print output nodes in place. Indigos can't compete in this market. Besides they don't have a Black only machine, as far as I know.

4. Stop thinking you have to own this business.
Nobody is going to own this business, just like nobody owns the internet. Not HP. Not IBM. Not Google. Not Amazon. Not anyone. Meanwhile, advertising is in much too much chaos to see a clear path. Direct mail is being completely redefined. No one can yet tell where it's going to land. My personal bet is that mass mailings go away in a couple of years.

To our viewers from Google.. get in touch with MPS people

Free advice to Google:
Get in touch with the folks who are hosting the first ever convention of MPS independent dealers. You can find out all about it by following the links from Jim Lyon's Observations. The MPS folks need to know about Google Apps. MPS (managed print services) is the printernet within a formal organization. And the independents have no choice but to get this right.

If you could join with those folks, you have an easy entry into Enterprise Level Sales for Google Apps. Plus you give them a path to dealing with overly protective IT people, who are scared stiff of the Cloud.

Besides, now that Wordpress can be created with an XML schema, and pediapress.com has already got an open source code for wikis in black only paperbacks, and PBwiki.com is already doing ECM for, they say, 100,000 collaborations and they have a huge number of users in the education space the timing might be just right.

Consider being the infrastructure to replace textbooks with WikiBooks and WikiNewspapers.

It might be just the way to take another run at AdSense in Print. I'm not surprised that it didn't work with newspapers. Right now they have that deer in the headlights thing going on. Plus they live on local advertising and were not about to let you get in the middle of that.