Update May 19th: HP is changing Marketsplash, making it white label for Indigo owners.
Oh, okay, HP is getting into the printing business. I mean, it's already selling digital presses and inkjet plotters and all that printing equipment jazz, but now it's getting into the printing business with Marketsplash. You know, it wants to print business cards and letterhead.
Hmmm, has this been tried before by a printing equipment vendor? Let's see, there was Creo back in 2001 with Printcafe. If I recall correctly, the big commercial printers went completely nuts over that. Quad Graphics especially went beserk , with orders going out to rip every single piece of Creo equipment out of all Quad plants, with the exception of their VLF Trendsetters that weighed about 5 tons and so were too heavy to lift.
Okay, then there was the genius move of the Adobe Reader product team to embed an option to order printing from Fedex right in the application menu. It would be an exaggeration to say bloody riots erupted in the printing world but I think less than a month passed before Adobe reversed the decision and killed the deal and issued a patch to remove Fedex from Adobe reader forever.
And while I can no longer be surprised by the institutional amnesia of big corporation, Marketsplash takes the cake. I mean, they are selling printing head-to-head against their customer base. The only thing I've surprised about is that I have not heard any screams of blue murder by the big boys of printing, but maybe they have other issues on their hands with the economic crisis of the last year.
But long term, if Marketsplash lasts a year, I'll be amazed. I'll bet the Indigo sales force are 100% p-----d, every day they are most likely hearing nothing from their prospects but curses (Hey! Lookie here. It's HP-man. Representing HP. Who in the month of February decided to become a head-to-head competitor to little ole' us. Hey look HP-man, there's the door. Use it. GTFO)
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Nice! Another absolute genius post. I love it, man, keep up the good work.
HP is Back stabbing to 1000′s of HP indigo owners, by offering online printing.
HP is selling equipment to small print shop@ the same time selling to end users, sorry giving FREE!!??
Shame on HP
You may recall that XEROX started that about 3 years ago and the franchise community upswelled at them, had very good meetings and thus grew their sales of equipment, by backing off the “new” HP idea. Franchisees are setting agendas for such meetings right now.
Don’t hold your breath HP!