Printing in the Post PC Era

Over the holidays I did a lot of thinking about this blog, and my only New Year's resolution for 2011 is to post here more regularly. Not because I like hearing myself talk, but because the subject matter has never been more relevant, and is in fact going to heat up this year. That should make it a relatively easy resolution to keep!

Last summer, at the D8 conference, Steve Jobs made some waves when he introduced the idea of the "post PC era." Jobs said the day is coming when only one out of every few people will need a traditional computer. "When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that's what you needed on the farms."

"PCs are going to be like trucks," Jobs said. "They are still going to be around." However, he said, only "one out of x people will need them."

Jobs said that this idea makes many PC veterans uneasy, "because the PC has taken us a long ways." And he went on to say, "We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable," he said.

It's an apt description, and is so much more than another excellent Apple branding campaign. The iPad was met with a lot of excitement, and some skepticism. There is still some skepticism around how publishing, ebooks, magazines, newspapers and other media-related businesses will fare on the new platform. But one thing has become crystal clear since Steve's D8 appearance: the iPad is a major hit, and it is in fact only the beginning of a new computing paradigm.

That paradigm is the fourth major computing shift: the Cloud/Mobile paradigm, which I think is aptly referred to as the "Post PC" era (the first three shifts arguably being the mainframe to minicomputer, minicomputer/workstation to networked PC, and the Internet.)

I realized that this is exactly what we are talking about here. The Rich Internet Printing concept is very much "printing in the post PC era".

Apple's AirPrint, HP ePrint, Google Cloud Printing; whatever Microsoft creates (presumably in the near future) to enable their tablet and cloud printing strategy. Service providers like EFI with PrintMe. Software from a variety of third-party vendors who enable printing from non-PC devices.

David and I are co-authoring a paper for the 2011 TAGA Advanced Technology Conference in Pittsburgh this coming March (visit TAGA's website for more information.) I'm going to use some posts here to vet the topics we are working on for that highly esoteric academic paper, but in a more accessible format.

We will do a deep dive into the applications, and report on the opportunities, challenges and limitations, and success stories. Stay tuned.