This Week in Internet Printing - HP and Apple

HP continued to march forward with more announcements (and a press conference scheduled today), regarding their ePrint initiative. You can read coverage by Adam Ostrow from Mashable at Forbes blogs. It's awesome to see so much coverage emerging on this topic, especially from traditional media outlets like Forbes. There's also a great article from last week by Louella Fernandez, a Principal Analyst at Quocirca Research, here.



In a nutshell, the Forbes article says HP is enabling printing from devices like iPad via email to new web enabled printers (picture above), and can connect directly to Google's nascent Cloud Print. Ostrow describes several connection initiatives HP has created, including Google apps like Docs and Picasa. He sort of cynically suggests that HP is doing this to sell Ink. But then adds that emailing files to printers opens doors to new applications-- honestly, I don't think email is going to be the vehicle by which printed news is going to be delivered. Email is OK, and it is fairly robust, but it isn't super reliable as a delivery mechanism for content, nor is it particularly secure. But it is interesting!

Both articles touch on the fact that Cloud Printing removes the need for drivers and updates, which is sort of the least of its advantages-- drivers haven't really been a big issue for users for about the last five years. That is, at least for individual users. Drivers have continued to be a problem for enterprise users with many different vendor's printers, dispersed geographically at many locations. The HP printers featured in this announcement aren't really targeted at the enterprise, and Google's Cloud Print isn't ready for enterprise prime time, though.

The timing of the Quocirca article couldn't be better with this week's Apple World Wide Developer Conference. The article mentions that in the iPad support documents, it refers to printing as "not currently supported", leaving the door open to future development.

I have wondered since the iPad launch if the reason printing support is absent on the iPad today is intentional, due to the fact that the device is completely focused on delivering media to users via the screen -- or if the iPad tech team just did not have enough time to get the printing working the way they wanted to before the launch.

I'm kind of hoping at the moment that as coverage continues this week of WWDC 10 in San Francisco, we'll see some announcements from Apple about how they plan to directly support printing. Apple has some amazing printing technology built into MacOS X and it would be a little shocking if they didn't leverage at least some of that to support printing from the iPad.

Since Google and Apple have been at odds lately, it seems unlikely that Google Cloud Print will be the mechanism via which iPad and other Apple mobile device users print. Although HP ePrint could be a contender (at least until HP comes out with their competitive tablet computer), it seems that we're likely to have several competing Internet printing initiatives emerge. Let's hope they all land at least close to a standard way of doing this, or at the very least, an interoperable one. That isn't email, that is.