The printer is dead. Nobody buys one, nobody needs one ― except when you do
Unsurprisingly, demand for home and office printers and copiers has been waning for some time; every year for at least a decade or more, at least one consumer market analyst declares the market for printers dead or dying. The trend line in sales slopes reliably downward.
And yet, people still ― on occasion, every now and then ― need to print, making the “printer person” a very important node, both in home and office printing. Even in an increasingly paperless world, a simple maxim is still true: he who holds the printer, holds the power.
“It comes for all of us eventually ― the need to print, and print now,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Feintzeig. “How much of our lives have we given to the mad dash of trying to find a working printer? Why invest in a hulking piece of hardware when you’re living in a nearly paperless world? Until you realize that that return label, or your kid’s homework assignment, isn’t going to print itself.”
Some still see opportunity in the printer business. In a recent interview, Steve Bandrowczak, the CEO of Xerox ― a company you might imagine to be panicked by the trends in printer sales ― said he still believes an entire business model can be built off it.
“If you think about printing as just printing a piece of paper,” he proposed, “I think about it differently. I think about the data that’s on that paper and being scanned each and every day in the devices. How do I start to bring insight and value to both documents and things that are scanned? Xerox has a great brand, but it’s synonymous with print, right? I have to get the industry to understand that we are more than just print.”
In other words, printing is a data business, and data is value, and to Xerox being the biggest printer guy in the room looks like a good place to be.
But back down on the consumer level, it has made those who do have home printers all that much more in demand. And some of them are getting sick of being the go-to printer person.
“Attention printer freeloaders: your mooching days are over,” declared PCWorld’s editor Gordon Ung. “No more Phish concert tickets, no more Braniff boarding passes and no more passport applications will be printed for you at 10 p.m. on a Sunday. Maybe after you’ve racked up enough printing costs at FedEx, you’ll realize that, yes, you need a printer too. Until then, your printer-freeloading privileges are cut off.”
Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.