Wirt writes:
> But as to the razor-thin margin inkjet printers, the posting
> misunderstands the nature of the printers themselves. It's not
> the printers that matter. In fact, I suspect HP would almost
> give them away for free if they could.

I happened to see a big display of cheap ($50 after rebate) HP printers at a
store the other day.

The thing that made this interesting was that this pile of HP printers was
in the produce department of my local supermarket.

Actually these particular printers carried the "Apollo" brand which HP has
recycled from their takeover of the Apollo computer workstation company as a
brand name for their line of printers which are so cheap that they don't
want their own name on them.  I'm sure this goes over big with ex-Apollo
employees :-)

> There isn't much to talk about in the news media about ink
> cartridges -- in that there is zero sexiness in ink cartridges
> -- but they do represent an enormous part of HP's currently
> profitability.

There was a Carly speech linked to on HP's home page last week (which I
think someone commented on here as well) which seems to be gone now, but
IIRC it has Carly referring to the printer supplies business as the "Crown
Jewel" of the company.

I've told the story before of visiting HP Corvallis where they manufactured
ink cartridges at the time.  In the warehouse there were these three wooden
pallets, each containing the biggest cubic-shaped plastic bottle I've ever
seen.  The bottles must have had a volume of a couple cubic meters each.
The bottles were translucent, and as a result you could see that one was
full of Cyan ink, one Magenta ink, and one Yellow ink.  Their job was to
turn these big bottles into itty-bitty little ink cartridges.  The person
giving me the tour said that he thought it cost them a couple dollars to
make each cartridge (which at the time carried a list price of $37).

So anyone who thinks that HP is a computer company these days hasn't looked
at the economics of the printer supplies business :-)

G.