subject: The Future Of Printing: In The Clouds? [print this page] Printing technology has evolved quite a bit since the days of the Gutenberg press. Never has this truth been as apparent as it is in the computer age, where printing methods are changing at the same rate as computer technology. That's mainly due to the fact that modern printing is directly dependent on computers. As they advance, printing advances. So where does that leave us for the future of printing? How about in the clouds?
Let's face it; offset printing isn't going anywhere - at least for the time-being. International printing companies have invested huge sums of money in offset equipment and facilities as recently as last year. They are not about to give up on that technology without getting their money out of. So the future of printing won't change much where newspapers, magazines, and periodicals are concerned. They will continue to be printed as long as publishers figure out that they need to alter content to survive.
The real change in printing will be business and personal printing. It's no secret that companies like Apple and Microsoft are actively engaging in a strategy to develop a single piece of hardware capable of handling all the daily needs of the average consumer. Add to that the push by companies like Google to take apps off the individual desktop and put them online, and you can see the driving force behind cloud computing.
The future of printing is headed toward cloud technology. The goal is for businesses and individuals to sign up and plug into any one of multiple local or regional clouds. Apps are being developed, as we speak, for hand-held devices like the iTouch and iPad that would allow printing of documents on any printer registered with the cloud. If a local print shop, for instance, was part of a cloud you belonged to, you could prepare a business document at the office, access it with your mobile phone, and send it to the print shop presses via the cloud.
The advances in printing are no longer tied so much to print quality. With digital imaging we've taken quality to the highest level possible until there are some new breakthroughs we are as yet unaware of. So the push to move printing forward is to develop ways to make it faster, simpler, more convenient, and less expensive. If the cloud offers the capability to do all that and more, it's a sure bet that a handful of entrepreneurs will find a way to make it happen.
Another possible avenue for the future is to completely eliminate paper in the business and personal environment. However, we've been talking about that since the advent of personal computers in the 1980s. For all the talk of reducing the amount of paper we produce, there seems to be more today.
Regardless of where printing is twenty years from now one thing is for sure, it will look a lot different than where we are today. Perhaps it will look like a cloud.
