HP Has a Secret and It’s Called MagCloud

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Ashlee Vance.

The transition to cloud computing has not been all that kind to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Over the years, HP has unfurled one cloud service and then another, only to rescind the services a short while later after a lack of interest from consumers. Such is life when you’re a company used to selling computing infrastructure goods that arrive via forklift rather than URL.

HP does have a secret weapon in the cloud, though, and that’s its line of online publishing services, which happen to be very good and often quite novel. The lead service—outside of Snapfish, which HP got through an acquisition—is MagCloud. It lets you create a magazine or a brochure and sell it on demand to the public for a price of your choosing. A DIY rocket enthusiast, for example, could craft a magazine dedicated to the goings-on in his local rocket building scene and then sell it to the club members. You can find some real examples of the magazines here…

To make such a service work required HP altering traditional printing economics. Typically you would need to guarantee the purchase of thousands of copies from a standard printing press to make it worth the company’s while to set up a run of high-quality, glossy publications. HP, though, relies on its own large digital presses that can create a single magazine copy for the same underlying price as thousands of copies…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-18/hp-has-a-secret-and-its-called-magcloud