Copiers & MFP's "Do You Want to Know a Secret"

Just a little gut check here. One of my every day chores is to pour over all of the press releases and threads that come across my google alerts. In recent months I've read about the Xerox purchase of ACS, the Canon purchase of Oce, along with the many articles and blogs that report that companies like Xerox, Canon, Ricoh and KonicaMinolta need to diversify.

In a recent statement from Canon Chief Executive Officer Fujio Mitarai, is that Canon could focus on aquisitions of chemical, printing and medical companies in the near future.

Let's face it, the writing is on the wall for the paperless office. I'm out in the field and every day I'm focusing on ways for my customers to improve their business process, and it's usally by printing or copying less and incorporating different types of software applications. I'm in an industry that makes money by putting ink on paper and we're selling solutions and hardware that reduce the amount of pages that are printed or copied, that's crazy.....are we driving our own demise?

At times we are tapping into to new markets with solutions like Planet Press, however these applications are not making up for the amount of documents/pages that are lost to scanning and emailing. Sooner or later, our industry will have to adopt a scan per page charge.

My generation "Baby Boomers" are still relying on paper to review, markup and distribute. My son's generation (he's now 26), he doesn't even own a printer. He uses his phone and his pc, does on line banking, and all of his bills are emailed to him. His generation may be the tipping point for paper, yeah we'll still have paper, but we'll not rely on it for distribution, or review.

Here's the secret:

"Every organization must prepare for the total abandonment of everything it does." Peter Drucker

-=Good Selling=-