NY Times’ Damon Darlin recently listed four reasons why we don’t use printers that much anymore:
1. We get road trip directions on the cellphone instead of printing them.
2. We share photos online at sites like Flickr or Shutterfly rather than printing them.
3. Rather than print out an article to read later, we hit “Read Later” or Read It Later, ShifD or Google Notebook and read the article on any computer anywhere.
4. Instead of printing out tax forms (the one time of the year the home printer gets heavy use), we do our taxes online, file electronically, save the file on the PC and back it up.
Not all of the above may be applicable to everyone, but this fifth reason does: printer manufacturers switched to the wrong business model!
Once upon a time, printers were significantly more expensive, to the point that buying one was weighty investment. However, in an apparent attempt to boost sales, manufacturers turned their products into loss leaders. They started pricing printers lower than the cost of production. That’s a reason why more people started buying printers.
So what did they do to stay profitable? Printer manufacturers raised the prices of ink cartridges. While they’d lose money for each printer sold, the idea was that the pricier cartridges would more than make up for it—especially since users have to replenish on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, that turned off customers, and created a new market for those who sell cheaper, “unofficial” cartridges, or offer refilling services. Manufacturers had to spend some money going after these third-party providers, no doubt.
It looked good on paper, but forcing people to pay more for ink cartridges have helped consumer-level printers become more irrelevant, as people share more and more soft copies of content. Printers may have been expensive before, but at least users weren’t penalized for their loyalty. By making ink cartridges prohibitively expensive, manufacturers opened a pandora’s box, and may never recover from that.
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