This morning Hewlett Packard announced that it was buying Tabblo.
It’s a pretty interesting acquisition. Tabblo has been been building a business by converting an online experience into a real-world experience; we take your pictures and your words and we put them on paper. HP makes a lot of money in that real world, putting those pictures and words on paper. HP stands to make even more money by doing that more, on more websites, with more partners, in more formats. Tabblo is going to help HP do that. GigaOM covers it well.
If you want to see our very first run at the problem, check out our PhotoCubes. All you need is a printer and scissors. It may be the slickest Tabblo experience yet. Very simple, very easy to get started, and a satisfying, physical result.
At Abuzz, a previous company I worked at, I’d often get a pop-up warning that the printer was out of paper or ink. When I went to the printer I’d find that it had hundreds of pages spilling out of it, all web pages, and had hundreds more in the print queue. When I talked to coworkers about it, they reported similar experiences. We blamed the interns. It became a running joke: “They’re printing out the internet, just in case it crashes.” Here we are, 8 years later, and it’s my corporate mission to be “the print engine for the web.” I am amused.
What does this mean for me personally? A longer commute, for sure. But having met our new bosses today, it looks like it will be an interesting trip as we learn the “HP Way.” This may turn out to be the company that I stick with. Only time will tell.
For those of you who are keeping score at home, this is my 6th time being acquired in less than 10 years. I might as well have titled this post “HP Puts Itself On the Auction Block.” They are a mortal lock to be bought by someone else now that I work for them. Let’s review my email addresses. None of these are corporate name changes; they are all acquisitions or job changes: @planetall.com, @amazon.com, @abuzz.com, @nytimes.com, @eroom.com, @documentum.com, @emc.com, @imlogic.com, @symantec.com, @tabblo.com, and now, @hp.com.
As Kent Brockman might say: “I for one welcome our new corporate overlords.”