A New Revolution in Print

Forget the paperless society. The hottest thing on the electronic frontier, says HP's Carolyn Ticknor, is print, ordered up and created by the consumer.

BY JENNIFER REESE

For Carolyn Ticknor, MBA '77, the promotion to general manager of Hewlett-Packard's LaserJet division in 1994 was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, this super-prestigious assignment was an indication of the esteem in which she was held at the company where she'd spent the last 17 years. Printers were widely credited with revitalizing the company in the 1980s and now accounted for an estimated 30 percent of HP's annual revenues. "It was certainly a job a lot of people wanted," says Richard Hackborn, retired executive vice president of Hewlett Packard's Computer Products division, who recommended Ticknor for the position. "She manages one of the two or three most desirable groups at HP."
On the other hand, many people believed the printer industry was past its prime. While HP owned well over half the laser printer market, growth was starting to slow. Nor was it a particularly sexy place to be in the roiling computer industry circa 1994. Interactive software was the rage, the Internet was just starting to sizzle, and more and more people were using e-mail to communicate. As Ticknor herself put it in a 1995 presentation to stock analysts: "There are those who say, 'You guys at Hewlett-Packard must be kidding yourselves. Paper is going to go away, and yet you've built a tremendous business based on transferring information to paper.'"
But far from driving the printer industry out of business, says Ticknor, the explosion in networking is giving it new life. More information may be exchanged digitally, but the sheer quantity of information is expanding so rapidly that a declining percentage can still mean big business. Moreover, Ticknor believes that networks are going to enable printers to supplant everything from the ubiquitous office copier to fax machines and overnight delivery. They're going to take a bite out of the publishing industry as well: A piece of what publishers have traditionally printed, says Ticknor, is going to start coming off the Web--and out of HP printers.
"While a lot of people continue to talk about the paperless office, Carolyn's developed a really exciting Internet-based vision for the future," says Rick Belluzzo, executive vice president of Hewlett-Packard's Computer Organization, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the company's revenues. In a telephone interview from her Boise, Idaho, office, Ticknor talked about that vision, and how HP is going to make it happen.
"I love to change how people do business," says Ticknor, who is friendly, straightforward, and expansive. "When I became head of LaserJet Solutions, I knew the combination of networking and LaserJets would eventually change how people do business. But I thought it would be slow. You can see the future, but what you can never see very well is when it's going to happen. Then the Web got hot, and suddenly the means to create a revolution in print was in place."
HP knows a thing or two about creating revolutions in print. In the 1960s and 1970s, high-quality computer printing was something that happened in big temperature-controlled rooms run by technicians. Individuals were typically stuck with noisy, temperamental dot-matrix printers that required special paper and turned out shoddy-looking pages. Then in 1984, HP introduced the LaserJet, and suddenly everyone was creating beautiful documents in the privacy of their own cubicles. "That was exciting, because it was the first time printing got out of the glass room and onto the desktop so people could play around with it," says Ticknor. "In 1984 we didn't realize what a big business it would be. In my mind the opportunity we have now is like when we introduced the first LaserJet in 1984."
The shift Ticknor envisions is every bit as dramatic as the transition from glass room to desktop. Instead of printing just about everything--forms, letters, manuals, memos, newspapers, books--at one location and then loading them on trucks to distribute, information will be distributed electronically, then printed when it arrives. We're now moving from a print-and-distribute world, says Ticknor, to one in which we distribute and print. And this means big changes--and big opportunities--for a company that builds printers.
It's hardly news that information is being distributed electronically. What everyone isn't talking about is the vistas that networking has opened for printers. When Ticknor looks at a fax machine nowadays, she sees a job that a networked printer could be doing, only better, cheaper, and faster.
People love e-mail, but they still use fax machines--and couriers and the U.S. Mail--to distribute documents they deem particularly important. Pages that are faxed, mailed, or sent via Federal Express arrive in a printed, permanent-seeming form, and they're hard to ignore. People might do nothing but fire off e-mails all day long, but when it comes down to resumes, resignation letters, and urgent press releases, they look elsewhere. But a printer with its own address--directly connected to a local area network--could eventually stand in for the fax machine, says Ticknor. It would have all the attributes people love in e-mail, such as speed and low cost, but documents would arrive in an original, tangible, printed form. It is only a matter of time, she says, before time-sensitive memos emerge clean, crisp, and timely from our personal printers instead of blurred or crinkly from the fax machine.
It isn't just the fax machine that's going to be ousted by the printer. The copy machine too may soon become an endangered species. "We found that most things that come out of a printer are turned around and copied," says Ticknor. "Copying is still how people think. It has a simple user interface, and people think they're saving money when they copy rather than print multiple copies of a document."
They're wrong. In a 1996 in-house audit, HP found that most office workers thought copying was cheaper than printing multiple originals. The company then calculated the cost of hardware, service, supplies, and electricity and discovered it cost Hewlett-Packard 2 cents a page to print and 6 cents to copy. "We decided it was a good idea to break the myth that copying was low cost," says Ticknor.
Ticknor promptly started developing a line of HP printers to make multiple original prints. Hence the 5si Mopier (short for multiple original printer) rolled out late last year. "Mopying may be a short-term trend, but short term could be 30 years," says Ticknor. A mopier is basically a printer that stands in for a copier, eliminating one step from the old print-copy-distribute routine familiar to any office worker. With one keystroke, you can send a document to the mopier, which will produce 20 copies and collate and staple them. In addition to saving time and offering superior print, the mopier is priced much lower than a comparable copier.
And if you want to mopy something that doesn't originate in your computer? A network scanner stationed next to the mopier does the job: You scan the document and send it to the mopier. A network scanner will also allow you to send that document to an e-mail address--which is far beyond the capabilities of the standard copier. "One of my personal goals is that people come to know HP for turning paper into electronic information as much as turning electronic information into paper," says Ticknor. "We want to let the user decide what media to work with."
What is perhaps most dramatic about Ticknor's vision is that the ramifications of distribute-and-print extend beyond the fairly limited world of office paper-handling. "We found that the pages going through cut-sheet printers represent around 3 percent of pages in the United States," says Ticknor. "Copiers and faxes make up under 5 percent and preprinted forms 8 percent. The other 85 percent comes out of the publishing industry: newspapers, magazines, books, manuals. Now I don't think I'm going to wipe out books, but the Web is going to change publishing."
Rather than receiving an entire copy of a publication, for instance, more scientists will go online, pinpoint the articles relevant to their work and then print them, says Ticknor. This saves valuable time: Dissertations crucial to an engineer's research can be grabbed off the Internet the instant they appear. Or a banker might skim a financial newspaper online and print out only one or two pertinent articles. "Not only are we going to take pages from copiers and faxes, but the Web enables me to look at the other 85 percent as well," says Ticknor. "We've redefined our market from being the laser printer market to the printed page market."
There is, of course, the inevitable question: If information is distributed electronically, why must it ever be printed at all? Isn't it conceivable that paper might become obsolete as the number of screens proliferates?
"People, in fact, do like to work with paper," says Ticknor. "I can go through printed material much faster. It's easier to read and I can stuff it in my briefcase. My concern has been: Will that be different with the next generation? So we've done a little research--it's still just anecdotal--and kids have said that when they read something on a screen it's public, but when they drop it onto paper, it's theirs. A broadcast is always changing, but put it on paper and it becomes a record. It's permanent. So even with kids, there's a psychological attachment to paper."
There are technological problems to be solved before everyone has a printer with an address. And then there are also the age-old marketing problems: How do you get people to invest in yet another new line of machines? "The fax was a 30-year-old standard, but it didn't take off until the hardware got cheap and everyone had fax machines," says Ticknor. "The trick to making something pervasive is standardization and ease of use."
Which is why Ticknor is perfect for the job of leading the latest revolution in print: Not only does she have a vision, but she is also extraordinarily practical. People who work with her say that no one is more attuned to the customer than Ticknor. "She's only interested in designing features that our customers will pay for," says Rich Raimondi, general mana-ger of the Hardcopy Solutions and Services business unit. "Whenever we talk about future products, she asks: Are these products focused on what customers really want? If not, we shouldn't be developing them."
Ticknor's customer focus may derive from the fact that she is not by training an engineer. Her formal training taught her more about people than technology. She got her undergraduate degree in psychology in 1969, finished her master's in industrial psychology in 1971, and went to work for Bank of America later that year. "In those days there were very few computer science degrees, so Bank of America had to hire people and train them in computer skills," says Ticknor. "I was hired to run the recruiting and training of those computer people and in so doing I became one."
She enrolled at the GSB in 1975, because, she says, she wanted to work her way into the mainstream of her industry--whatever that industry might turn out to be. "When I went to college, I don't think I had a clue what I'd do when I got out. No one could have convinced me I'd be running a multibillion-dollar business. Maybe being a woman in those years you didn't know what was possible," says Ticknor. "But one of the things that happened to me at the GSB was I found out I had management talent. I could see when I worked with a group that the group did better work. At the GSB, I was never the smartest or the hardest-working person on the team. But together, we were perfection."
She learned a few other things during her time at the GSB. Her first son was born during the winter of her second year, and she took off a couple of weeks, then went back to campus, finished her coursework, and graduated. "It was one of the dumber things I did in my life," says Ticknor. "That little boy did not sleep and I was a basket case from exhaustion." But it taught her a lesson. She knew what she wanted when she got out of school: part-time work. HP gave it to her. "That was the clincher," says Ticknor, who is married and has two college-age sons. "It was the combination of the industry they were in, the contribution the company was known for in terms of invention, and the fact that they said: 'Hey, we'll take you any hours, any days you want.'"
Hewlett-Packard has benefited richly from its flexible policies: Ticknor has been a star. Hired as a programming and operations manager in 1977, she became section manager of a communications lab in the Information Networks division in 1983. In 1987 she was named general manager of the Roseville Networks division, developing products for local area networks.
"She did a superb job," says Hackborn. "She's bright, high-energy, and extremely focused. And in the world of computer networking, if you don't have those attributes, you're just not going to do very well."
The same could be said for the world of printers. But faced with some of the industry's toughest questions, Ticknor has come up with strikingly inventive and compelling answers. In a universe of e-mail, networks, and millions of flickering screens, printers need to become more than isolated, single-function machines, says Ticknor. Sophisticated new printers are going to become our gateways to the world, bringing us letters from relatives and memos from the boss. They are going to print articles from the newspaper and chapters out of technical manuals. They are going to be indispensable, they are going to be everywhere, and they are going to change the way we think about the printed page. Needless to say, a company that builds them has a very bright future.

We're now moving from a print-and-distribute world to one in which we distribute and print.

Photograph by PETER STEMBER