How important is the Internet in real life?
Wake up my friends. It is past time to look beyond the next equipment payment,
employee insurance premium, sales tax audit, production order, power outage, paper price hike or
ghost images that drive you and the customer up the wall. It is time to decide the future of your business.
Look at the business world outside your printing facility.
Printers are now living in a real world of computers that are networked locally, over a wide area, and nationally.
The Internet is the most widely used facilitator of information transfer. These computer networks have
already changed the way people live and communicate on a business and personal level. It takes only
seconds to Email a three page document from our east coast to our west coast. Compare this to normal US
mail that takes from two to five days to reach its destination. Invoices can now be Emailed seconds after a
print order is completed and will reach the client before the product does. On a regular basis Hewlett Packard
sends whole print orders to printers over the Internet. This includes all of the document and graphic files for
software manuals. Your clients will soon stop walking through your front door.
In my first article about the paradigm change now taking place in the world of business communications I
mentioned the 10,000,000 pages now stored all over the Internet. This data base is growing at the rate of 300,000
pages per week. When we translate this database into lost printing it means that if each page was worth an
average of $0.03 [3 cents], then the industry just lost $9,000 in revenue. But if the average print order is
100 pages then the industry lost 30,000,000 pages of production for one week. Taking this a step further at
$0.03 [3 cents] per page the industry lost $900,000 for one week. From this point you can play with numbers
and multiply fifty two weeks by $900,000 and arrive at $46,800,000 in lost production. This does not take into
account reprints or production beyond the first 100 copies of each page.
The Internet is growing at about 2,500,000 new accounts per month. One congressional hearing in 1988
estimated that there would be 100,000,000 people connected to the Internet by the year 2000. More recent
estimates forecast 200,000,000 people using the Internet by the year 2000. Television stations across the
country hype the Internet more than a dozen times a day. Most professional magazines contain one or more
articles about the Internet each issue. In October one print journal devoted the issue to Print By Wire.
200,000,000 Internet users by the year 2000 is entirely feasible now that Microsoft is offering Internet
connectivity through Windows 95. I expect to see every computer operating system offering Internet
connectivity within two years.
How can our industry survive the shift in business communications? Look for my articles,
A Look At The Future, Surviving the Change, Strategies for Survival.
If you would like to contribute an article to the Industry, contact our marketing department at PrintUSA.
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Thanks you for your time.
Martin L. Turnbull
Copyright 1995, Martin L. Turnbull. This article may be reproduced without permission provided that the entire
article is reproduced without change and the author given credit.
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