Postfully Yours

There’s an interesting article in today’s NYT (my apologies to future visitors, I know this will probably be behind the wall).

One quote from an HP executive caught my eye:

He said one of his daughters, a college student, had told him, “I don’t need a printer.” Like many people of her generation, she lives online and finds it unnecessary or too difficult to put bits onto paper.

Many of us are in that position. Before Postful, I’d been nursing an old laser printer for many years. Given the small volume of printing I did, it would have been hard to justify getting a new one. I would have rather had full color and the high quality of the newest models, but it wasn’t worth it. Printing photos (warning: large file) just wasn’t an option.

All of this means that it is just getting more and more difficult and expensive to do-it-yourself with printing. This is really where Postful comes in. We let you produce the same quality you’d get if you were spending thousands on a printer and half an hour on each document in seconds, for a fraction of the cost.

Most people don’t need a printer, what they need is to send a letter or get a copy of a picture to put on their wall. The shift has already taken place where most people are printing fewer items but requiring more quality in those they do print. Postful and other web printing services are positioned to take advantage of the shift to convenient, high-quality services and away from printing as a consumer activity.

HP won’t stop doing printing business. They make beautiful digital presses (even though for now we’re using Xerox). Printing isn’t dead, but the personal printer may be on it’s way out. The transition is one that HP seems to be recognizing and preparing for both as a equipment vendor and as a service provider (Snapfish, Tabblo).