And the 25 Most Significant Events beat goes on as we present five more significant events from the past 25 years. If you’ve been following along, it’s interesting to see the connection, and not slight connections either, between many of the trends on this list. That whole analog to digital transition, the first trend on the list is without question the most notable. Equally notable is the channel disruption caused by the Mega Dealers, which has created a domino effect in other segments of the industry.
As you read the next five events, I encourage you to think about how those are connected to some of the other events already highlighted in the first two installments of this five-part series.
HP’s Edgeline Technology Goes Over the Edge
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and HP’s much ballyhooed launch of Edgeline inkjet printing technology in 2007 was one of those times when the printer giant came up short. “It was so hyped up and the anticipation stretched out over a year or more,” recalls Brian Bissett, publisher of The MFP Report. “It was at the time when inkjet was growing by leaps and bounds in the consumer and SOHO market and the idea that if it was unstoppable and would inkjet enter the [office] market and would HP dominate that with this new iteration of inkjet technology?”
Back in 2007 HP was still perceived as an extremely powerful company and Edgeline was a technology that could potentially revolutionize the market and change the competitive landscape with a new generation of Edgeline MFPs. “The reality was it was a bust—technically, marketwise, operationally, design-wise, physically, everything,” says Bissett. “It landed with a thud, and to HP’s credit they tried it for a couple of years and then quietly put it out to pasture.”
Canon Changes the Face of the MFP with MEAP
Canon’s Multifunctional Embedded Application Platform (MEAP) introduced around 2005 represented the next phase in what MFPs in the office could do, might do, and should do. Canon was out there before any of the other vendors with a fairly comprehensive, robust, tested, documented software platform that let Canon sanctioned third parties or Canon itself develop applications that could run on or through the MFP and transported the device into a true computing platform. “That was a big step,” states Brian Bissett of The MFP Report. “Others soon followed, but Canon had the vision and did it earlier and in some ways better than some of the others that came after it.”
The Demise of the NOMDA/BTA Show and the Emergence of OEM Dealer Conferences
For anyone who ever attended a NOMDA (National Office Machine Dealers Association)/BTA show in its heyday, that was the must-attend event for the dealer and manufacturer community up until the early 1990’s when it lost its relevance as the major OEMs began hosting their own dealer events. Paving the way for those dealer events and partially responsible for the fall of the BTA show were manufacturers such as Mita and Sharp who found it much more cost effective to pour millions of dollars into their own events for their own dealers rather than spending money so competitors could get a firsthand look at what they were doing.
Still, for anyone who ever attended those NOMDA conferences in the 1980’s, it was a one-stop shopping experience and an amazing educational opportunity, and an event that brought the entire industry together in one location for three days. There’s nothing like that today and for better or for worse there probably won’t ever be anything like it again.
The Emergence of Managed IT Services
The industry is in the midst of this big event right now, an event that is opening up opportunities for many dealerships and creating confusion in others. “Do we or don’t we?” With major OEMs such as Konica Minolta committed to this service, sooner or later there’s going to be an industry wide embrace of managed IT services, including those who have tried and failed at it in the past. There are likely more open minds than closed about Managed IT these days even if the dealers who are truly successful at it represent a distinct minority.
Color Copying Goes Mainstream
For a period of time in the 1990’s and early 2000’s the analyst community made the annual prediction that the coming year was going to be “The Year of Color.” It was one of those predictions that if you made it year in and year out, eventually you were going to get it right. The truth of the matter was that throughout the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, color was slowly but surely expanding beyond the niches and into the mainstream office. Some of that acceptance was the result of the emergence of the Internet and the demand to print color Web pages and other business materials, another reason was because we don’t live in a monochrome world and the added impact that color provided to business documents was beyond dispute. As color has gone mainstream we’ve seen some backlash against the costs of outputting documents in color, but if you ask most dealers today, which devices they’re selling have the most traction, color or monochrome, the answer is no longer spelled out in black & white, it’s in color.
