What Would An HP WebOS Printer Look Like?
During a recent quarterly earnings call, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd was quick to mention how webOS would be implemented into their ecosystem of devices. The first one mentioned? It wasn’t a smartphone, it wasn’t a tablet… it was printers:
I think in this case of Palm, and our planned acquisition of Palm, it really has more to do with the intellectual property and the fact that when you look across the HP ecosystem of interconnected devices, it is a large family of devices. When we think of printers, you’ve now got a whole series of web-connected printers that, as they connect to the web, need an OS. We prefer to have that OS in our case to be our IP, where we can control the customer experience as we always have in the printing business, and that’s a big deal to us.
Hmm. Okay. It’s a concept that many of us webOS users are trying to wrap our heads around, but let’s give it a crack, shall we?
I myself was scratching my head as to why the heck HP would be so excited to use Palm’s intellectual property (IP) in their printers… until I saw an HP printer commercial:
Okay, now we’re getting a little warmer. (P.S. Love the ad. Complete with snarky iPhone-like music. Can’t wait ’til it’s used to advertise webOS). As Mark Hurd made abundantly clear, HP has made a big push for web-connected devices. Since printers are a big part of what they do (they made about $6.5 billion on printer and ink sales alone last quarter), it stands to reason that they’ll play a huge role in this.
Currently, HP boasts 28 printing apps (that’s right… I said “printing apps”), of which 14 utilize the web:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Certainly, a card metaphor for switching between these apps makes a lot of sense. While multitasking (if any) is a little harder to imagine, other webOS features like browsing (without a computer), contact and calendar synergy (for printing business cards/agendas), or even emailing of photos or documents directly from your printer aren’t so far out of left field. Of course, any number of third party webOS apps (take your pick… Evernote, Checkbook, Tasks, etc.) could extend their utility by incorporating print functionality. Finally, during a recent Reuters Global Technology Summit, HP’s Vyomesh Joshi (executive vice president of Imaging and Printing) said HP is striving to make printing from smartphones easier… Palm’s smartphone experience will definitely come in handy here as well.
This is just a start, of course… I’m sure HP’s brainstorming sessions are much more ambitious. While I personally think that printing is becoming increasingly obsolete — and I cringe at the thought of some kid wasting precious paper and ink to print out a full-page picture of Shrek — HP is banking that web-enabled technology will catapult us into a new era of printing. And webOS may be what takes us there.
Got ideas/opinions of your own on this topic? Leave a comment! I’d love to hear ‘em.
