...more useful on paper than on a laptop. And communication, printing out office documents for others to read.
We're looking at all three as digital workflows. That's going to be a critical part of the future of printing as we progress along rich digital veins.
Won't the dependence on web services lock people into your servers, or could I build a web service that's entirely independent of you?
The architecture we're designing, printing from the cloud, should let people deliver the services they want. Going wholly outside our system isn't possible right now. We have to make sure our device works out of the box, and for that to work it has to be seamless. We won't charge for these services, so there should be no reason for people to damage their ease of use by switching to a non HP-server.
We don't want to build an app store, as Apple has for the iPhone. We're going to build in a plug-in infrastructure that others can use.
And the same's true for inputting documents?
Yes, of course, so you can feed in documents to the cloud or services as well. There's lots you can do with that. If you think of our devices as all-in-ones — scanners as well as printers — then you can use them to inject analogue documents into the digital workflow.
How is this going to make you money?
Our business model is closest to that of Amazon's Kindle. They make a bit of money on the initial sale — money on the content, not on the connectivity. We want to delight our customers with what they get.
Printing has had an explosive growth in the past, so it has been fine leaving the users to decide what to do. The advantage to us to going in this new direction is that it is a differentiator that makes our printers more attractive.
Our services are better tied in to our output devices, like iTunes is to iPod, only we can work without a PC in a middle. No drivers, no software. We're entering the era of the driverless printer, and we want to be in the lead of that.
But you will have a very good idea of what people are printing when, every page and drop of ink...
We're getting involved with the privacy people to make sure we're OK there. We will know a lot about how the product is being used, the consumables, of course. In terms of security, we're going to have the right thing, full strong encryption from client to printer. We're lucky in that there are a lot of online storage services who've solved this already, so it's a known problem.
When will we see these new printers, and have you got a name for all this yet?
First fruits? End of the year, beginning of next. We have been experimenting online under the name CloudPrint, but we'll have to wait for the marketing people to come up with the real name.
