Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Undead technology

I did a double-take just now when I followed a link to a PDF file and noticed the Kinkos/FedEx logo in my PDF viewer. When did that happen? [Imagine a quick Google search here] Looks like the deal was announced back in June.

OK, so if I'm reading something perfectly well online, I have the option of sending it off to my local copy shop, having it printed out and then venturing out to go pick it up. Or, I suppose, I could have it FedExed to my doorstep.

Something tells me I'm not in the right market niche for this.

I could, however, imagine FooCorp emailing a bunch of, say, nice glossy marketing collateral from the Oceania headquarters to the Eurasia headquarters, where it would then be printed at the local shop, collated and bound and delivered to the appropriate desks. Clearly Adobe and Kinkos/FedEx think that people will want this, and who am I to say them nay?

At the risk of sounding like an, um, broken record, it seems that certain technologies have not yet figured out that they're supposed to be dead. Text isn't dead. It's now a verb. Print appears to be doing just fine, as well.

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