Business Tech

Antonio Rodriguez

HP has radical plans for the future of consumer printing, promising an end to printer drivers and the introduction of devices that just don't care what you're printing from--Windows, Linux, iPhone, or your washing machine.

CNET News' sister site ZDNet UK talked to Antonio Rodriguez, the chief technology officer of HP's consumer-printing division, about the fundamental changes it wants to make to low-cost output.

Q: First, what do you define as consumer? Increasingly, we're finding enterprises buying "consumer" equipment.
Rodriguez: That's an interesting dynamic. For me, it's a question of who's buying it. If the people buying it use it, it's consumer. If it's being bought by people three stages away from the people who use it, it's enterprise.

What's the thinking behind what you're going to do?
Rodriguez: Twenty-five years ago when the inkjet was invented, it looked fantastic compared to the quality of screens and nothing else could touch it. Now, lots of people have caught up with inkjet technology, and screens are a lot better. It's an incredible technical process squirting a billion droplets onto a sheet of A4, but it's commonplace.

There's a move to authoring and editing digital content, so we want to focus on ways to do that which keep printing relevant. And we're excited that while people are used to thinking of printers in terms of feeds and speeds, they're forgetting that printers these days have networked computers built in. We're going to make a lot more use of that.

There's going to be a change in the way printers are named, too. Today, if you go to the store, there are more characters in the model number than there are letters in the alphabet. That's before you get into driver hell.

What does that mean in practice?
Rodriguez: You'll take your printer home from the store and plug it into your network. It'll register with our servers over the Internet, and you can link that registration with your various accounts.

We have ways to make that easy. When you print, you print to our servers and those send the output to the printer. Or you'll be on a Web service, tell it what and how to print.

It doesn't matter what you want to print from. It's a Web service, so you can print from your computer, or your iPhone, or whatever. If you're printing from Google Docs, for example, it really doesn't matter what you're using to access the Web service. It could easily be a post-PC device.

But you can print locally if you want?
Rodriguez: You will be able to use it locally, too: we support local discovery via Multicast DNS.

Are people going to be comfortable with this change to Web-based printing?
Rodriguez: The way that I see it, we have to deliver on a set of core printing experiences. People print as keepsakes, photos, collage, on-demand printing. They want to keep a memento. We know that's a base human need.

Where will it take place? Ten years ago, it was all desktop clients--Adobe, Office, etc. Now the data collecting is taking place on social networks. What we've done is gone to people like MySpace and said: "We will provide a set of Web services that lets you expose more complex products," so users can select photographs and have them delivered as collages, or formatted as cubes you can cut out of the paper. Then there's utility printing--a map or a recipe is going to be more useful on paper than on a laptop. And communication, printing out office documents for others to read.

We're looking at all three as digital workflows. That's going to be a critical part of the future of printing as we progress along rich digital veins.

Hewlett-Packard printers, like blue jeans in the old Soviet Russia, are apparently a hot item among consumers in Iran.

According to a report in Monday's Boston Globe, a third-party distributor in Dubai has been selling HP printers in Iran since 1997. That's two years after President Clinton signed an order banning all trade with the country. If HP executives cut the deal with the Dubai company, called Redington Gulf, knowing it intended to sell HP products into Iran, the deal could be a violation of trade law, according to the Globe.

But did HP know what the small Dubai outfit was doing? As the Globe reported, the distributor's Web site says it began in 1997 "as a team of five people and...HP supplies as our first product, we started operations as the distributor for Iran." The article also quotes an HP executive in the late 1990s enthusiastically discussing sales in Iran.

Since it was started, Redington has grown considerably, and now sells high-tech equipment throughout the Middle East and Africa for a number of manufacturers, ranging from other hardware makers such as Cisco and IBM to software makers such as McAfee and Microsoft. "Today," the company's Web site says, "Redington is proud to be described as 'the brand behind brands' in the region."

An HP spokesman told CNET News that HP has "a policy of complete compliance with all US export laws."

The Globe story comes at a particularly sensitive time, with fighting once again escalating between Israel and Hamas forces in Gaza. The trade embargo against Iran was put into place by President Clinton in 1995 to force the country to stop funding militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and to pressure it to curb its nuclear program.

But scarcity -- or at least the knowledge that owning an HP printer is in some way taboo -- has had the opposite impact: It has made them highly desirable among Iranian consumers. By some accounts, HP has better than a 40-percent share of the Iranian printer market.

Hewlett-Packard on Thursday announced it has dropped a patent infringement charge against LexJet Corporation over the type of ink used in remanufactured HP print cartridges.

In exchange, LexJet has agreed to alter the recipe used to make its ink as well as pay HP an undisclosed sum.

HP originally filed suit against Florida-based LexJet on May 22.

LexJet is one of many companies that take used HP ink cartridges and resell them with their own ink inside. It's a sensitive topic for HP, one of the world's largest producer of printers and ink cartridges, which has sued several cartridge and ink makers in the past claiming infringement.