April 10, 2008

Catching Up with HP's Vyomesh Joshi, the Ultimate Printer Pundit

By Anne Rutherford

Printer Pundits: HP's Top Printer Executive Sees Lots of Printing Opportunities Even as the World Becomes More Digitized

It's your birthday in the year 2012. You receive a birthday card from your best friend. But it's not like any card you've ever seen. When you open it, you're holding a YouTube video printed on an HP printer. Welcome to HP's vision of the future as expressed by Vyomesh Joshi, Executive Vice President of HP's Imaging and Printing Group.

Joshi, known as "VJ" in the industry, is a man on a mission, speaking around the world about the future of printing — "Print 2.0" as he likes to call it. HP's Imaging and Printing Group is a $26 billion business (larger than most entire companies in the Fortune 500) so when Joshi speaks, people listen. Us included. Below we report on Joshi's recent media appearances.

Laser What?

"You have two choices with what to do with Web content," Joshi told John Battelle who interviewed him in October 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit. "You can either view content or you can print it." Joshi says it is inevitable that publishing will go the way of the music and photo industry — completely digital, transforming books, magazines, and newspapers. And, predicts Joshi, "in 10 years, everything will be printed by inkjet printers," 70% of it from Web applications.

For example, in Victoria Shannon's International Herald Tribune article, Hewlett-Packard Shifts Strategy on Printers, Joshi discusses how his two daughters in college would love the ability to print Web-based profiles of all their friends at the end of the year as a keepsake — sort of like a custom yearbook. "That could be a very powerful way to document and chronicle their social connections during their year at Berkeley," he said.

A Lousy 1.8%

Today, HP owns about 46% of the printer market share, but Joshi measures true penetration not by how many printers HP has installed around the world (approximately a billion, he thinks), but by how many actual pages people print.

"The actual number of actual pages printed in the world is 50 trillion but we have only 1.8% — a lousy 1.8% as I call it — of that market," observed Joshi in a February 28, 2008 interview by Joyce Kim and Chris Albrecht on the GigaOm Show. And only 10% of that 50 trillion is digital, he notes. Joshi says HP can double its business by capturing "another lousy 1.8%."

Joshi has worked at HP for over 27 years, working his way to the executive suite of the legendary Palo-Alto-based company from the company's research and development wing. HP has been the worldwide market leader in printing since introducing its first inkjet and LaserJet printers in 1984. The company has sold more than 300 million inkjet printers since then and, in 2006, shipped its 100 millionth LaserJet printer.

HP's Printing-Related Acquisitions

Joshi wants to see a print icon on every Web page and blog that would give readers what he called a "template-based experience." HP has actually bought such technology — Tabblo — as we reported last year. Likewise, HP is creating widgets for blogs so that you don't have to print 150 pages of comments when all you want is one. The company has started working with the trend-setting blog BoingBoing.

HP also owns photo sharing Snapfish. Though lagging behind Flickr and other competitors, it has still increased its user base fivefold. LogoWorks, an online stationery store for small businesses, is another example of HP's new focus.

Furthermore, as reported by Mike Freeman in his Union-Tribune article, San Diego Facility Creates Web Press, HP recently announced its "Web Press" device, which enables publishers to send their pages electronically over the Internet to multiple locations rather than printing large volumes in one location and then trucking them to readers and stores. While announced in March, HP says it won't be available to customers until 2009.

Joshi insists that all of these ventures are completely consistent with HP's core business strategy. "Our business model is very simple: Print," he has said in interviews." Joshi and HP don't care what people print, they just want to make sure an HP solution exists for every possible scenario.

What About that Other Silicon Valley Icon Down the Road?

Joshi has served on Yahoo's board of directors since 2005. And as you may have heard, Yahoo is the lead business story these days. Will it become part of Microsoft? Will it become a Google affiliate? Unfortunately, Joshi isn't saying much about Yahoo though he did tell Battelle that he doesn't see online advertising as a good fit for HP. "There's too many people who want to be in that business." But as to what Yahoo plans to do? That he won't say. Probably not even if he had a video greeting card in which to do so.

About Printer Pundits
We spend most of our time here at Databazaar Blog on printer gear, but this impressive technology doesn't just appear by magic. With Printer Pundits, we bring you interviews with and stories about some of the luminaries in the printer industry — senior executives, analysts, journalists, inventors, and others. Of course, in today's world everyone is a pundit so please share your insights below.