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Someone at HP Labs once explained to me the tension between interesting research and finding a way to make a tiny improvement to ink jet cartridges. As he said: the latter were probably worth $100 million / tiny improvement. So it was a difficult line to walk...
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The laser printer was a marginal part of the computing revolution and would have been incremental for Xerox if it had not been monopoly-busted, but because it did get busted, the laser printer immediately turned into the new moat. $100b self-disruption
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Though the net value of all the other “fumbled” (spun out really) computing technology dwarfed it in the 80s, the laser printer was huge and triggered the even bigger offset-busting production print biz in the 90s.
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But overall fair assessment. While I was at Webster the focus was on tiny improvements that would translate to billions through multiplier effects. $1 saved per replacement part per year for a $500k production printer x 100 is $50m
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The year I joined, 2006, the huge firefight was the fast wear-out rate on fusers on the iGen3 because print shops were using it for much higher area coverage than it designed for, so all hands on deck doing something about it. Company was bleeding money in support contract costs.
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Sorry ignore dumb wrong-math example above, got myself confused. The cost of the printer is irrelevant. Think in terms of $1 saved across a million printers per year by making an annual replacement part $1 cheaper
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