Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

FedEx Kills Kinko's Brand

In today's edition of PrintAction's weekly newsletter, I found the headline: FEDEX KILLS KINKO'S BRAND. I had read this elsewhere, but had not previously encountered the embittered remarks of the company founder, Paul Orfalea.

I could paraphrase the accompanying article, but as I'm a contributing writer to the publication, I hope that editor Jon Robinson will not object to my quoting it in full:

In a surprising move by the shipping company, FedEx will be rebranding all of the FedEx Kinko's stores into entities known as FedEx Office. This move came just before the company announced a $241-million loss, mainly attributed to Kinko's. The name will cost nearly $700 million.

"Kinko's was primarily a copy and print-service provider when it was acquired in 2004," said Brian D. Philips, president and chief executive officer of FedEx Office. "The name FedEx Office more accurately represents our broader role of providing superior information and services through our company-owned, digitally connected locations around the world. We are a back office for small businesses and a branch office for medium to large businesses and mobile professionals."

Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea issued a statement about this move. The first Kinko's store was founded in Isla Vista, California in 1970; Orfalea left the company in 2000. "Friends, acquaintances and journalists have been asking me for comments on FedEx's recent decision to drop the Kinko's name from their copy and print centres. Although I sold my financial interest in Kinko's several years ago, this news hit me hard. I have mixed emotions, because Kinko's as I knew it has been gone for a very long time.

"For 30 years, I worked with tens of thousands of fellow Kinko's co-workers to grow an innovative customer-driven business. Every stage of life required Kinko's – being a student, business owner, bride, job-seeker, sales person, event planner, soccer parent and much more. We took pride in helping customers achieve their goals and always put customers first.

"Those of us who built the company from a single site in a hamburger stand near the campus of UCSB in 1970 to an international network at the millennium assumed our grandchildren would know what it meant when we said we created Kinko's. Sadly, they won't. At Kinko's our motto was 'In Ideas We Trust.' Those ideas, expressed in the way we shared power, shared profits, and shared knowledge, touched tens of thousands of coworkers and millions of customers from 1970 to 2000. The signs may be coming off the building, but when you next meet a former Kinko's coworker and he or she brightens up to tell you how it used to be, take note of the fire in their eyes. That's the Kinko's I'll remember."

The Future of Printing at drupa

Every four years in Dusseldorf, Germany an enormous printing trade show, called drupa (standing for Druck Und Papier [in German: printing and paper] gets underway. According to the official press release, "With 1,971 exhibitors from 52 countries spread across an exhibition area of over 175,000 square metres and an anticipated 400,000 visitors from around the globe, the world's No. 1 trade fair for the print and media industry (running) from 29 May to 11 June 2008, will be bigger than ever before. 'What the Olympic Games are to sportsmen and women, drupa is to the print media industry,' said Werner M. Dornscheidt, President and CEO of Messe Düsseldorf, highlighting drupa's status."

I don't know why Germany became the home to this paradigm of enormously exhausting and unbearably unworkable trade shows. Drupa is nearly two weeks long! I worked a booth there in the 1990s and am still in recovery.

This is the country that also hosts the annual CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, "the world's largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments." The 2008 show, held from March 4 to March 9, featured "5,845 exhibitors from 77 countries (with) attendance up three percent over the previous year, totaling 495,000." (There are numerous others, but I'll leave it there, to avoid repetition.)

The claim that drupa covers the "print and media industry" is something of an overstatement: it covers the printing industry. The great mystery for anyone reading a site called The Future of Publishing, which continually highlights the challenges to print, is how, in 2008, drupa manages another record year.

There may be a clue in this chart, taken from the October 2007 newsletter of the NPES, the U.S. organization of suppliers of printing equipment:

It's not surprising that with the fall of printing sales, printing equipment sales are falling also, down some 30% from their year 2000 high point.

The printing equipment industry needs to pry whatever remaining dollars exist in a slowly failing industry. The solution perhaps, in the immortal words of Lorenz Hart (from 1937's "Babes in Arms"), "I've got a barn, let's put on a show."

There's Excitement in the Air!

Is there a full moon: for some reason tonight's news is packed with fascinating technology developments.

I subscribe to the TED website (http://www.ted.com/), which very generously allows mere mortals who can't find the time (or afford the price of admission) to experience much of what takes place at this extraordinary conference. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/112)

Tonight an email from the site directed me to a presentation by Blasé Aguera y Arcas (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129), an extraordinary scientist, younger than he has any right to be, demonstrating groundbreaking software at the TED conference last March. It's sort of about photography, yet is an astounding example of where "sort of about xxx" leads to brave new worlds.

And also, dare I say more, the report on the new Microsoft "Surface" computer is truly compelling (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118048592054217955.html). It's not just a flash-in-the-pan, but a device chock-full of new ideas. (I'm offering the Wall Street Journal link here (which has a good video), but there's lots of coverage across the Web.)

Then the TED website led me to fascinating earlier research co-authored by Blasé Aguera y Arcas which methodically reexamines (and challenges) Gutenberg's exact methodology in "the invention of printing. (http://www.open2.net/historyandthearts/discover_science/gberg_synopsis.html)

Such an embarrassment of riches in a single night!