Over the
last several months I have been intrigued by a series of thoughts pertaining to
mobile printing and document quality. It combines my dual loves as a technology
blogger and analyst, both for retracing history and for looking ahead and
finding parallels, which pays off by potentially offering insights into how the
present will evolve in the future.
To start by going up a level, as a follower of the mobile
printing beat since the category’s inception (at least if we define “inception”
as the launch of the iPhone in 2007), I've been interested in the development
of industry thinking around user needs and market segments. In my 2013 mobile printing
year in review (see “We’re getting somewhere,” http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2013/12/mobile-printing-2013-year-in-review.html),
and also during my Mobile Printing presentation at the Business Imaging Expo in
December 2013, I challenged the industry (and myself) to come up with views and
insights about mobile printing customers that go much deeper than the typical, high-level,
xx% of mobile device users want to print, yy% don’t know how to print, and zz%
will definitely print once they figure out how to.
Since then I have looked at one proposed segment of the
market, via my January Observations (“Making the case for secure mobile
printing, Breezy’s ‘Definitive Guide’ offers insights via a new, free ebook,” http://jimlyonsobservations.blogspot.com/2014/01/january-2014-observations-making-case.html),
and this month, I come back here with one that highlights another group of user
needs that don’t apply to everyone, but do indeed fit with what is potentially
a fairly large number of users.
That segment I define as those who would like to see high-fidelity, desktop-publishing-quality print (and documents, generally) come to the mobile environment, just as it developed from the Macintosh and then PC worlds starting back in the 1980s. But before I take a short trip down memory lane to see what we can learn from those days, let me start with a more general technology (i.e., non-printing) theory of “progress” that I might call the “two steps forward, one back” approach to innovation.
My example? It's been noted many times that in our move from
pervasive landlines to being highly mobile in terms of our personal telephone
communications, we have accepted often greatly reduced call quality and
reliability. Mobile phones (remember when we called them cellular phones?) have
generally added a great set of customer benefits (contained in their very
definition), but at the same time require a compromise in terms of how the
calls have actually performed. Happily, this does seem to be getting better,
though the best we can hope for is call quality and reliability at parity with
the good old days of landlines.
So I ask whether
we have made a similar tradeoff with document quality via smartphones and
tablets, especially when it comes to printing those documents. Members of the
industry have bemoaned the poor translation (dubbed “accuracy” by some) of
viewable documents compared to the same printed documents via most of the
ever-growing choice of methods of printing from mobile devices.
And it
takes me back to my participation in the industry, when the HP LaserJet
(introduced almost exactly 30 years ago) brought 300 dpi resolution to the
printed page (that “quality” was also joined in our positioning with “quick”
and “quiet”), but then we waited still a few more years before
publishing-quality typography and formatting became the rule, at least at the high
end of the market. Apple’s Macintosh, in combination with its Adobe
Postscript-based LaserWriter and Aldus PageMaker software, was the gold
standard, and HP LaserJet printers, based on the PCL language, combined with
IBM-compatible PCs and Aldus or other software, provided the solution for a
larger but not-quite-as-elegant share of the market. Geeks learned from the typography
experts about things like “typefaces,” “common imaging models” and “WYSIWYG” (What
You See Is What You Get, pronounced “wizzy-wig”), and as printer resolution
doubled and doubled again, publishing-quality documents became that status quo
in large segments of our business.
And even with efforts to forge ahead with solutions for
those print-quality customers in the mobile-printing world (I laud Thinxtream
and Monotype here, at least of those companies I am in regular communication
with), it can seem a bit of a long struggle, with mobile-based documents of the
day somewhere equivalent to the “line printer to Courier” stage of desktop
printing. (To those who weren’t around, that was a big step, but looking back,
almost laughable to think some would have seen the fixed space typewriter font
– i.e. Courier – as any kind of reasonable end point.)
In checking in with a friend who
goes back to those days (and who was one of those typography experts the other
geeks learned from), I was pleased he had a similar view to mine, in there
being a long way to go. He offered (off the record due to his still-active
engagement in the industry), “To my mind, the topic migrates quickly to ‘Composing
for the lowest common denominator’ where tradeoffs with quality and aesthetics
are made for the newly enticing gains of content ubiquity.” And while issuing
this articulate view of the state of things, he, at the same time, remains
optimistic for progress.
And as far as indication of hope, and something
which inspired these thoughts, came to me via some marketing communications not
long ago. This from the San Francisco-apps developer whose product is the
mobile word processor, Quip. Their message includes “Quip is a modern word
processor that enables you to create
beautiful documents on any device – iPhone, iPad, Android phones and
tablets, or your computer.” (My bolding added for emphasis.) They go on to
point out good modern-day features/benefits of the app, like collaboration,
mobility, interactivity, and simplicity, but they had me a “beautiful
documents” – now if they can fulfill on that promise, and using our industry’s
solutions, get those beautiful documents to the printed page, we’re getting
somewhere! I might even add, via a movie cliché, “back to the future.”
Comments