Mobile Printing - Not Enough Demand from Consumers or Enterprises makes it a Hard Sell

A new IDC study, "Mobile Printing Landscape: Transition to Early Adopters," provides a relatively detailed description of the current state of the mobile printing landscape. In the report, IDC examines a cross section of mobile printing solutions that represent the current state of the industry and the likely future of mobile printing. The study includes a mix of mobile print providers that range from hardcopy peripherals (HCP) manufacturers, independent software vendors (ISVs), OEM infrastructure providers, and mobile OS infrastructure providers (Android, Apple, RIM and so on).

One of the interesting things about mobile printing is that the "concept" has now been around for a number of years. There is nothing particularly new about the notion of mobile printing, but what remains a mystery of sorts is why mobile printing hasn't really caught on. Mobile printing is certainly not pervasive - from either a "consumer in the home" or from an "employee in the workplace" perspective. There hasn't been a huge groundswell of demand, and based on that there certainly hasn't been any huge effort put forth by the industry to deliver a mobile printing standard for either the consumer or the workplace.

The new IDC report makes this clear: market fragmentation and a lack of defined standards is impeding adoption by the early majority. Early adopters exist, but their numbers are small and they aren't particularly vocal. Further, rapid adoption has been slowed by challenges related to device discovery, device registration, and device (mobile OS) printing support, to name a few. For consumers just thinking of these issues makes things inconvenient enough to ignore mobile printing.

This has resulted in the lack of a substantial and organized effort to deliver a mobile printing standard. Perhaps users are simply too concerned with being mobile and too immersed in the anytime anywhere experience - not to mention the ease with which photos, multimedia files and documents can simply be stored up the cloud - to care all that much about "printing stuff." The beautiful screens that some tablets and smartphones now sport can certainly show off images and text at least as well as print documents - so why bother with print at all?

Despite the seeming lack of interest from mobile users and the resulting initial growing pains (or rather, the lack of growing pains), IDC believes that the print industry will come together on some common standards to meet customer expectations on mobile printing, and that the idea of mobile printing will in fact transition from a "nice to have" to a "must have" feature.  Well, good luck with that we say, but we aren't of the belief that users will in fact come around to seeing mobile printing as a must have feature - at least not in the consumer space. The enterprise however may evolve differently.

IDC believes that for the end user the mobile printing value proposition will eventually emerge and will primarily center on convenience. Users can print anytime, anywhere from their handheld device without installing print drivers or having other specific knowledge about a printer, such as its IP address. No one, however, needs to know their cloud service IP address either, and simply accessing a photo or file without having to really think about it, and then displaying it on the crisp looking screens of mobile device is the epitome of convenience.

Mobile workers, on the other hand, can begin to leave their computers behind when traveling outside of the "home office," with the knowledge that they can still print documents anytime and anywhere if necessary. The problem on the enterprise side isn't that of user demand (even though there isn't much of it) - our own discussions with enterprise IT lead us to think strongly that there is simply enterprise IT apathy about installing mobile print technology - such as EFI's PrintMe product (perhaps the best effort to date to deliver an easy and simple to deploy enterprise mobile print solution).

Why bother? If users need to print something they can easily e-mail their files to themselves and then print out stuff in the usual manner.

IDC recommends that vendors should look at mobile printing holistically, spanning the entire consumer/small office home office [SOHO] to enterprise experience. As far as possible, the solution should be consistent across the consumer/SOHO and business context. EFI is a company that certainly thinks along these lines, but it continues to see a slow developing marketplace.

We believe that enterprise IT is the key to potential growth - it is here that demand needs to move from apathy to strong demand in order for the mobile print market to crystallize into something other than a niche market. IT demand in turn will only emerge if users make demands of enterprise IT - it hasn't happened to date and we doubt it will, for the reasons already noted above.

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