PC Magazine: How has your business changed?
Joshi: Over the last 22 years we built a printer business, now we need to shift to a printing business. Just like phones, they started in the kitchen, but today you don't make money on phones.
We are focusing on pages. From a page point of view, 48 trillion are printed a year. Now we measure our market share in pages, and we are less than 2 percent. When you start thinking about pages, we have a tremendous opportunity.
A lot of the focus has been how you convert atoms into bits and virtualization. No one is talking about how you convert bits into atoms. Bits into paper. It's not just from printer to printing, but how to convert bits into atoms, print into paper, print into DVD. Our core competency could make it a very big business opportunity. Not in the creation or the distribution business, but in the content consumption model.
What about the user-generated revolution in content?
Joshi: There's an empowerment to the consumer to create the content. In broadcast, the editor of the newspaper was deciding what mass consumption should be. Now the consumption drives the creativity. They can share, add, mash it up, and then share that content in various forms. Every camera sold today is digital. People are taking lots of pictures. We are finding that they are repurposing, sharing, adding, and then presenting it in a book form. We are seeing printed books, photo finishing, home printing growing exponentially. Creating a lot of content, video, books, news, combining user created content with professional content, mash it up print on DVD, on paper. In our view it is really popular.
So there's less paper printed, more looking online?
Joshi: In 1984 we were promised the paperless office. And in 2006 we are using ten times more paper. The information explosion is big, but more viewing leads to more printing. We think 54 trillion pages a year will be printed soon.
There is a limit to where you can take the hardware, the important part is to figure out what customers are doing. What we are doing is building a very simple UI. To design something simple is very hard. Pages will move on the web, content creation is digital, consumption is where analog is. The user interface is all software. Look at Snapfish [owned by HP]; it is the best user interface for photos.
What about video?
Joshi: I think the whole concept of instant gratification and short films is to tell a story. Go back to anthropology. Why do we take pictures? The real core reason? It is to tell a story. Now with digital, the kids are telling the story; they tell it to communicate to friends.
But that's not what's happening now. Instead of telling a story, I want to show you that I'm having fun at the party. It's really just saying hello, more like social positioning.
Joshi: Think about Facebook, why is it so popular? It's the community. The human element is sharing, making sure you are being heard. New technologies are just a better way of telling the story, a better way of being heard. We have to connect back to the physical world.
Any new imaging devices coming up?
Joshi: There's Halo (HP's high end video conferencing system). With Halo you want to start at a very high end, and do away with the need to travel. I could be in Israel, you could be in San Diego, and we can meet. The technology is there, you could create that kind of experience. Moore's law as applied to these technologies means we will go from enterprise customer to mid-market to small/medium business to consumer. Instead of sharing pictures, you can have a conversation with grandma and family. You can come home and say hello. That's going to be real. The important part for us is to design the interface, and then have zero latency. At HP, Halo rooms are used by engineers and marketers.
When will Halo show up at home?
Joshi: Let's talk about Moore's Law. After mainframes were invented, how long did it take to get to the PC, 20-30 years? Now you could do it [in the home]. We'll see. It's all fundamentally about technology learning curves and engineers. We'll figure out how to make it happen. I remember the days when we were working on ink jets. The Fujix printer to print photos was a $30,000 machine. We did it for $500. Now you can print for 49 dollars.
This was 1995, when we looked at Fujix. We introduced our first ink jet for the home for $500 in 1997. It was all about learning curves and cost. With Halo, will it be a public network or private network. Once things are invented, things will come down, it's a natural law. The scale will help you from a cost structure perspective, and the learning curve will help you from cost structure too.
A lot of interesting things are happening with ink jet technology, including DNA sequencing. Are you going to be part of these markets?
Joshi: We want to be part of supplying the technology. It's a long lead item, we don't think that's the kind of business we want to be in. Inkjet is nanotechnology. We developed a pump that accurately delivers nanoliters and we make a half billion of them a year. It's high volume, high production. Instead of ink, put in a drug and use it for drug delivery, or DNA sequencing. You can use it for all kinds of stuff. Our core competency is in making a pump to accurately deliver liquid. We are very interested in supplying the technology, but commercializing that and go to market is far away from our core. Continued...
What about 3D printing?Joshi: We have done it in the lab, layer after layer, to create a prototype. It is a very interesting application. The main issue is strength of material. Make sure that the structure and chemistry are right. We could jet anything. We need to figure out how we want to create the right type of material.
Are there other uses for lasers in the home?
Joshi: There are interesting applications at a micro level, where you combine technologies. We will see transparent electronics, and a lot of interesting things.
What about Kodak's technology, they claim to deliver pages at half the price.
Joshi: Kodak says they are half the price on photos only, not black and white. You will find that claim is not really valid. What do customers print in the home? Seventy percent of it is black and white. Kodak has patent issues. The problem is going to be any kind of business you want to build, it has to be a real business model. Look at Dell, they started (in printers) three years ago, and still can't make money.
What about the Memjet technology?
Joshi: It's very interesting; they are claiming they have a prototype of one. It takes years to commercialize the technology. We always love competition; it gives us a wakeup call.
How are you addressing the problems of color calibration?
Joshi: The first thing we are doing in the high end of printing is putting spectral stuff in the printer, intelligence inside the printer. We introduced this at PMA. Talk to (famous photographer) Douglas Kirkland, he believes that inkjet is better than silver halide. The prints we do on inkjets will last for 200 years… The current spectrofilter is very expensive; we are convinced that it will come down in price.
What about large format printing, will it ever go into the home?
Joshi: We have printers that are 64 inches wide. Our break even point is... the same cost as a screen printer right now. We just introduced a 64-inch wide printer that is four times faster. We are finding that the whole signage market is ready for transformation. It's all done on Sytex now, but it is more of a service play, people will order a poster. The problem (with home) is size, it's not about the ease of use. Our problem is whether it will fit into the home and the furniture.
Every screen printer in the world in five years will be replaced with our technology, for sign printing and more. We are going to get many new pages, books, magazines printed.
What's next for your division?
Joshi: While we are very successful, I want to transform our business, it's not about the means, it's about the end. It could be making DVDs, printing, or viewing. Build on our core competency, and move our organization. Print 2.0, this is where we want to go. Everyone claims atoms to bits, no one is claiming bits to atoms. That's where we can have a long-term charter.
I always learn that things can come from places you don't expect [VJ tells a story of the engineer in Corvallis that came up with the LightScribe technology, and how it became a product]… You have to pay attention. Who would think we'd print our boarding passes three years ago. I wish I was the inventor of that, but I'm not. I do believe that the new user needs are going to be choice, control and convenience. We were focused too much on speeds and feeds.
Number one in my mind is quality, then reliability. Our brand is based on that.
Source: PCMag