Technological change doesn’t slow for a recession, but customers do stop buying.
That’s a real headache for any tech company which has the misfortune to be on the verge of a major new product cycle in the depths of this downturn.
A case in point is Xerox, whose “solid ink” technology is one of those long-term projects that has been years in development, and which is now ready to yield a significant product breakthrough.
The technology involves plugging sticks of solid ink into printers and melting them as needed, a process that yields far cheaper colour copies than the laser technology that currently dominates office printing.
There are echoes here of the way Microsoft and Intel attacked the datacentre market: a technology developed to be “good enough” works its way up to the high-performance part of the market. Xerox bought the solid ink technology from Tektronics at the start of the decade and has been working ever since to extend it from consumer devices to the office machines which are the sweet spot of its business.
It’s unfortunate for Xerox that it’s ready to do so in a year when most companies have little money to spend. How should it respond?
One answer, says Angele Boyd at IDC, has been to massage the marketing message. Most office documents are printed in black and white, and the big hope for Xerox has been that the new ColorQube line of printers will greatly expand the colour market. But in the downturn, Xerox has had to rein in its ambitions: its message has been narrowed to focus far more closely on the cost benefits, rather than the advantages that may come from greater use of colour printing, says Ms Boyd.
Ultimately, there’s no getting around the fact that this is a bad year to launch an important product. But as Microsoft has decided with Windows 7, there is only one way to deal with it: press on regardless.
Tech cycles cannot be slowed to fit the economic cycle. Any company with a technology edge has no choice but to run fast to maintain its lead. The consolation for Xerox, as Ken Weilerstein at Gartner describes it, is that the lead it is building over rivals like Ricoh and Canon is likely to endure in the long term.
The short term picture is less pretty. The best it can hope for is that its new printers will catch the early winds of the next economic upturn and pull it out of the recession faster than the competitors.
