| Ah, that's why I led of with me being cynical because I am; I absolutely get what you meant and traditionally that is what disruption would be; a new player entering the market and disrupting the incumbents due to the player innovating where the incumbents stalled out trying to maintain their position. My coy interpretation/version is that frequently this ends up less about innovation and more about shifting consumer bases by simply making a flashy product with a superficially cheaper barrier of entry while introducing other means of having recurring revenue from consumers. My take is just that with physical office stores in particular, printers are just the sort of thing that people who go to physical stores to buy electronics still want, but I would wager it's dwindling, and a quick search seems to suggest this also [0], while another [1] suggests it's a slow but steadily growing market (note: this report mentions a bit on 3D printers, but the full report is behind paywall so it's not clear if that factors in at all) I've never heard of Raptor Computing until you mentioned it, and it looks like they have a niche with Power9 processors and that they allow you to get basically kits or prebuilts? I kind of feel that's the "unique" niche that differentiates Raptor Computing from someone who might try to disrupt printers, in that Power9 does have a uniqueness to it, where as the technology for most consumer printers is just the same, it's just the vendor lockdown that differs. You might get a dedicated following of privacy conscious persons who would like a completely unlocked and non-aggressive home printer that just prints, but I just find myself wondering if the cost of ownership is _really_ worth it for the right to own a printer. As another poster commented on the privacy concerns of copy shops, I'm starting to wonder if maybe that's the next direction that can be done to consolidate the options to professional printing units that make a proper effort to secure the process of printing end to end and make ubiquitous "utility-like" printers that can be placed anywhere to offer scanning/printing/signing services. But I don't think the answer for this is home-office use anymore, and I don't see it as a market that too many are interested in trying to upset, but instead just making sure everyone gets their cut as the market transitions. [0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/274447/hewlett-packards-... (Note: I have no idea how valid this is so take it with that frame of reference) [1] - https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/5323193/printer-g... |