Say what? 'I don't need a printer'
OK, not everyone needs a printer. But it takes some chutzpah to say that to your dad--when your dad is the senior vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard's printing division.
Nonetheless, the college-age daughter of HP's Vyomesh Joshi recently said just that: "I don't need a printer." According to a New York Times story on HP's latest printer strategy, Joshi was using his daughter as example of her generation, which lives for the Internet and finds it annoying and/or unnecessary to print out anything.
"The intent of this is not to scare you, though I am scared," Joshi told his employees at a quarterly "coffee talk" earlier this year.
Following his intuition, Joshi is pushing a plan to get printers to do a significantly better job of printing Web pages. Right now, such printouts can look junky and downright foul. Joshi's goal is to make printing Web pages a nonevent--thus keeping people printing, and keeping HP's revenue column smiling.
Natalie Weinstein is an associate editor who works out of Austin, Texas. She spent a decade as a reporter and editor in the newspaper industry before joining the CNET News staff in 2000. E-mail Natalie. 
