PrintCEO has a nice little write-up about the big splash that HP wants to make at DRUPA. The write up came out about 2 weeks ago and I have really struggled to create a nice, diplomatic post about the very interesting question that it raises which is central to the future technical development of the prepress and printing industry.

Which is, have the consumable product managers woken up and smelled the coffee?

Let me state the obvious. For the last twenty years, consumables have been the tail that has wagged the product development dog. No product that had a business plan that didn't include high-margin consumables, has ever been okay'ed by any of the major vendors in this industry (Agfa, Kodak, Fuji and now HP). Even thermal CTP by Creo in the 1990s wouldn't have gone anywhere without Kodak subsidizing purchase of the machines so they could sell their thermal plates.

Everybody knows this but nobody says it. Every printing owner that has the brains and the skill to sign a cheque knows that when a major vendor comes calling, the price of the equipment is just a number on a piece of paper. It's the commitment to buy consumables that is the real money train for any vendor.

Digital presses are the ultimate money train. Instead of an offset press that eats commodity paper and commodity ink, you have a system where for the next twenty years, the printer goes to the vendor and buys ink, totally locked in. Not even Microsoft has a near guarantee revenue stream of twenty years everytime they sell one of their operating systems.

HP knows this. The army of MBAs that they have in the backroom know this, they salivate every time they check their Excel spreadsheet and calculate tonnes of ink sold per press over a ten year period times gross margin time price.

Printers know this. They know it like if they handed in a pickup truck that took gas from any station in the country and got back some strange SUV that could only be fueled by special pumps from YourCompany Incorporated.

Now, the big question that needs to be asked is: Does HP know that the printers know that digital presses are the Moneytrain express for the vendor and why the bleep should they climb aboard? And I have carefully read the latest announcements from HP, and gees it looks like SOS, same old stuff, they just aren't addressing the INK issue. Like I'm a printer and why should I pay YOU for ink for the next twenty years of my life. And for sure, that ink you want to sell me is going to be a damn site more expensive than the ink I'm buying now.

I don't have a bitch with HP. Well okay, I have a bitch with consumables product managers. The ones that I have met tend to come from the consumer division where Joe Schmuck in office land really is stupid enough to pay $40 for a cartridge of ink. And the product manager spends all day and night with his business analysts thinking "How can I get Bill Printingguy to act like Joe Schmuck?"

Man, it was the same thing ten years ago, only with Xerox. Big-ass machines coming to market to compete with offset presses and legions of salesguys walking around the booths wanting to talk to you about anything except the cost of the damn ink.

Tagged as: consumables, Drupa, hp, ink, offset, prepress, printceo, printing