An open letter to the Australian and NZ printing industry from John Weichard

Fedex Kinko's, with Adobe's help has opened a printing shop on the most valuable piece of real estate in the world; your customer's desktop.

Think yourself lucky because unlike the American printers you have a short time before you feel the full effects of this. For your American peers this is a king hit, out of the blue and catching them unprepared. Fortunately, as the US hasn't invaded Australia and New Zealand, Americans don't know we exist so you have a little time to get your defences set.

How long do you have? I would tip until the next Acrobat patch is released.
Now I can hear the chorus of exclamations about not fearing Kinko's and they aren't in the same league as you etc. But you know what? You're wrong. Kinko's are now in your customer's face and in their ear and courtesy of Adobe they are now in your league.

So ask yourself what you would do if you were presented with this new gift-wrapped conveyor belt that delivers other printer’s customers to your door. How big a threat is this? The most common way for customers to deliver artwork (flawed as it is) is email attachment. For your customer to send you a file they have to from their email program.

1. Click 1 New Message

2. Enter your email address. Let's hope you're in their address book or they can remember or they can find you business card.

3. Click 2 Add Attachment

4. Clicks 3, 4, 5 and 6 Find and select file

5. Type in the subject line

6. Try to guess what you need to know about the job

7. Click 7 Send

The email then makes its way to you, sometimes quickly sometimes slowly and hopefully it isn't corrupted when it arrives.
Now to send to Kinko's the customer is in Acrobat (the industry standard) looking at their artwork and they

1. Click 1 File, Send to Fedex Kinko's

2. Click 2 Send file

3. Enter details Click 3 OK

Is your relationship with your customers so good that they will crawl over Kinko's to get to you.

Why do I care, I'm not a printer? I run D2P and D2P has delivered PDFs over the internet since 1998 to and for printers. We compete directly with this new feature of Acrobat.

If Kinko's becomes the dominant player in the industry my business is in just as much trouble as yours.

I know a lot about customer delivered artwork and you should be very worried about "Send to Kinkos" it is clearly superior to the most common methods although I believe we do it better.
If you want to take affirmative action you can:

1. Lobby via trade associations and government

2. Petition directly on your own behalf

3. Boycott their products and / or

4. Support an alternative

I would like to submit D2P as an attractive alternative that it is important for you to support. D2P knows more about getting artwork from creator to printer over the Internet in Australia than anyone.

D2P is and has been from the start:
1. An open company

2. Australian

3. Focussed on improving the relationship, communication and collaboration between customer and printer

4. The region's leading supplier of broadband and remote workflow solutions for the printing industry

5. If you would like to know more about D2P and our products please go to;

www.d2p.com.au

www.tpx.com.au

http://howtoslashprintingcosts.info/

If you feel threatened by "Send to Kinko's" then as an absolute minimum you should be in touch with us, and seriously considering supporting one of our local, open and sophisticated solutions.

John Weichard


Managing Director


D2P Pty Ltd


Got a view on this story? Drop us a line and let us know