Johannes Gutenberg, arguably the inventor of printing, would laugh at our efforts to try stopping printing. The paperless office was already proclaimed when I started in this industry 20 years ago and if we believe in statistics, we’re printing as much as we did back then. So why is it that printing doesn’t die? Smartphones and cloud services should have taken care of that already if the bloggers and technophiles were right.
It hasn’t happened for various, entwined reasons. The most compelling one is also the most basic: We are physical beings and printing is one of the very few ways to bring memories and information from our digital life into our actual life. The fact that not every piece of information, document, picture, etc. has to be a physical experience anymore does not mean that printing is dying. Quite the opposite! It means that printing becomes more unique. You don’t agree? Then ask yourself would my grandchildren rather inherit my Photobucket account credentials or my photo albums? Or would my wife prefer an e-mail or a card for our anniversary (together with flowers of course)? Or do I provide handouts for every meeting or just the ones that truly matter?
What is dying is the same that is dying for technology in general. The willingness of its users to deal with it, making it work, to compromise on when its needed. Like a phone call or streaming a video, printing just has to work. And that’s the goal behind what we do here at ezeep. Moving all the challenging, error prone and frustrating components of printing to our ezeep cloud managed service leaves complete simplicity on users’ desktops and smartphones. And simplicity is key for easy printing aka. ezeep.