Many years ago, Xerox saw the hand writing on the walls with the very thin commodity margins or the loss of selling an inkjet to a customer. Inkjet providers sell these devices, often, as a loss. Then they try to reap the benefits of a cartridges profits to make up for that loss. The margins kept getting thinner and thinner and with the explosion of low cost refillable inks on the market, it was a matter of time.
I worked for Lexmark for nearly 13 years from 1997-2009 in the Customer Support Center and the Sales side. I even worked inkjet overtime talking calls from Mom and Pops inkjet endusers for a little extra cash after college. I have many friends in Lexington, KY looking for jobs after losing their jobs. Many are very talented programmers.
Paul Rooke tried to revitalize the Consumer Print Division of Lexmark over the past few years, before he accepted the CEO role at Lexmark recently, after the departure of Paul Curlander. The hand writing was on the wall. Lexmark kept losing shelf space at Best Buy, Office Max, Office Depot, and other vendors to Epson, Canon and HP.
I wish the folks the best at Lexmark, but when a printer becomes a commodity and they are not always the lowest cost commodity, or the best name in the inkjet business, it is a tough sale. Lexmark still has a good Business Printer Division, Solutions and MPS footprint, and has acquired some players recently to help strengthen those solutions for products like Enterprise Content Management, Intelligent Scanning. It needs to strengthen its offering in the wide format (Tabloid) and larger iron space to compete with the likes of companies like Ricoh, Sharp, Oce, Xerox, Canon, and others. These are competitive times, solutions are the life blood of organizations to help drive pages out. That does not hold well for commodity players in this market space.
