HP's (NYSE HPQ) printer chief, Vyomesh (VJ) Joshi is a busy guy these days.
As Fortune's Jon Fortt points out in his recent blog post "HP’s printer challenge", there's a good news/bad news aura surrounding the company's industry-dominating printer business. The good news? All that revenue and especially profit "heavy lifting" that the HP income statement traditionally depended on from the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) has relented some with the other business units' continually improving health. And the bad news? The printer industry's relative low overall growth is causing reasons to re-think the business and effective growth strategies. Fortt quotes VJ on the "Printing not Printers" strategy shift which I covered in this blog as early as December 2006, and really has roots in a decade-old strategic view which had at its foundation the "HP Paper Pie" that described the world of printing in its entireity and visually pointed out the tiny slice that was then, as now, digitally-printed pages. That graphic has been well-known by industry insiders in and out of HP since the mid- to late-90's. Not that an old strategy is a bad strategy!
Interesting, too, is the juxtaposition of the HP piece on Fortune's Big Tech blog. It's sandwiched in between two posts on the Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT)/Yahoo (NASDAQ YHOO) deal. Of course that story has been getting a tremendous amount of "ink", but the symbolic "observation" is that HP's Joshi is a member of Yahoo's board of directors, which of course voted over the weekend to forego the initial MS bid. Something else for VJ to ponder!
As Fortune's Jon Fortt points out in his recent blog post "HP’s printer challenge", there's a good news/bad news aura surrounding the company's industry-dominating printer business. The good news? All that revenue and especially profit "heavy lifting" that the HP income statement traditionally depended on from the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) has relented some with the other business units' continually improving health. And the bad news? The printer industry's relative low overall growth is causing reasons to re-think the business and effective growth strategies. Fortt quotes VJ on the "Printing not Printers" strategy shift which I covered in this blog as early as December 2006, and really has roots in a decade-old strategic view which had at its foundation the "HP Paper Pie" that described the world of printing in its entireity and visually pointed out the tiny slice that was then, as now, digitally-printed pages. That graphic has been well-known by industry insiders in and out of HP since the mid- to late-90's. Not that an old strategy is a bad strategy!
Interesting, too, is the juxtaposition of the HP piece on Fortune's Big Tech blog. It's sandwiched in between two posts on the Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT)/Yahoo (NASDAQ YHOO) deal. Of course that story has been getting a tremendous amount of "ink", but the symbolic "observation" is that HP's Joshi is a member of Yahoo's board of directors, which of course voted over the weekend to forego the initial MS bid. Something else for VJ to ponder!
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