Business Bytes
Renee Oricchio

Making the Web Fit to Print

 

Hewlett Packard appears to be more concerned with staying in the black, rather than going green. There's a great little story about it in The New York Times this week, but I'll link it from C/Net's syndicated version so you don't have to subscribe to access it.

Apparently, the higher ups at HP are worried that web pages are so difficult to format for easy printing that surfers of the near future just won't bother. It's a short walk to imagine that would means less demand for printers — and more importantly less demand for all those ink cartridges (where HP really makes its money).

With that in mind, Hewlett- Packard recently acquired Tabblo, a start-up developer out of Cambridge, Mass. Tabblo is known for its web-based software that features user-friendly templates for rearranging web pages into a printer-friendly format.

So, while the rest of the world is trying to come up with new ways to go paperless for the sake of their bottom line - and the planet. Hewlett- Packard is trying to come up with ways not too. To quote its own press release, "HP will be firmly on the path of becoming the print engine of the web."

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio