Mobility Print is Dogma. DOTC calling it. No. No way. Nope.

11/2011

The final gasps of a dying niche - print/clicks/marks on paper.

Mobility Print, means I can print from my Droid or TouchPad from almost anywhere.  But, for me, the numbers are not all that impressive:

Print a hard copy in a hotel? Sure, 12 pages a year.

Print my airline tickets? Sure 52 pages a year.

My mother printing my aunt's recipe for stuffed turkey? Sure, 11 pages a year.

Print a map? Okay, another 13 clicks.

That's 87 pages. In a year. At 12 cents/image, we're talking about a buck a year.

Print People Magazine at home? Nope.

Download a .PDF from Scientific American, for 99 cents? Possibly.

Applying this to the B2B world, when Alaska Air issued each pilot an iPad, they replaced every, single flight manual for every jet in their fleet.

Mobile print philosophy would argue that if the iPad had the capability of printing, each pilot would go home and print a manual the night before a flight.  Wha, wha, whaaaaaaaaat?

Guess who is most interested in mobile print? Go ahead, guess.


The same folks who told us for the last 20 years we needed copiers with 11x17 capabilities.

At the very best, mobility print is a gamble, a hope and a dream along the lines of "if you build it, they will come..." It's like Michael Dell claiming PC's are still viable. What the hell else can he say?

At the worst, mobile print is dogma, a false tenant supporting the egregor that is our OEMs.

When I apply the standard MpS Purity litmus test, lowering cost by reducing machines and volumes, I see mobile print as a scheme to shift volume, when in reality, Mobility Print acknowledges the death of traditional prints, not a shift in behavior.

Are you still dubious?  Good.

Consider the growth in the number of documents kept in the cloud versus the number of documents printed out of the cloud.  Look at BoxNet and DropBox. And don't forget Google.  Sure we can all print from the cloud, but for every document you've saved on DropBox, how many times have you printed?

The growth in cloud documents reflects the desire of end users, the new "Mobility Class", for flexible access to content. Not a flexible access to print.

Interesting, isn't it, when we look at things sideways?

Again, it's not a print-less world, it's a world with less print.




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