As printer prices decline, consumers will continue to pay for supplies like cartridges and services like digital photo prints, which will ultimately generate larger revenues than units shipped, a Hewlett-Packard executive said on Monday.

"It's about the end, which is the print, not the means, which is the printer," said Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP's Imaging and Printing Group, during a speech at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in Dana Point, California.

HP is going after high-usage customers -- those who not only buy printers, but also buy ink, toner, and media -- Joshi said. HP generated revenue of $28 billion from its imaging and printing business in fiscal 2007, and the supplies and services revenues are increasing, Joshi said. "We are moving from printer to printing and moving from units to pages," Joshi said.

HP ships 45 million printers a year, but around 49.3 trillion pages are printed each year by consumers, SMBs, and enterprises, Joshi said. HP has about a 1.8 percent share in the pages printed segment, and doubling that will double HP's printing revenue, Joshi said.

Of the trillions of pages printed, about 9 percent are digital and 91 percent are analog, Joshi said. The first thing HP wants to do is move more pages to digital, which expands printing opportunities for different business segments. For example, by capturing pages in a digital format, users will be able to print images at home, over the Internet, or direct from retailers, Joshi said.

To illustrate the point, HP has introduced an inkjet mini-lab that can rapidly print tens of thousands of digital images in just an hour, Joshi said. Instead of printing a simple 4-inch-by-6-inch photo print or a shoebox of photos, users will be able to create a photobook, Joshi said. That will happen in the next five years, Joshi said.

HP is also trying to take the cost out of declining product segments like mono laser printers and applying it to products like color laserjets and multifunction printers that deliver better revenue and profitability, Joshi said.

The company is also trying to improve its logistics for better profitability in the printer segment, Joshi said. HP currently sells products in 179 countries, he said.

The company has acquired multiple companies to promote its Print 2.0 strategy, aimed at boosting HP's print management services, online photo services, and tools for digital content creation. In January, HP acquired Exstream Software, a company that manages the creation and delivery of communication materials. The company acquired Snapfish, an online photo services provider, in 2005.

Last year it abandoned the digital camera business to reinvest in the Print 2.0 strategy. The camera business wasn't profitable enough for HP, Joshi said, saying the strategy shift allows HP to focus on its printing and digital imaging business. HP didn't have a chance to reach the top position, so it exited the camera business, he said.

SharePoint is the fastest-growing server product Microsoft has ever had, Chairman Bill Gates told attendees at the annual SharePoint conference in Seattle on Monday.

That growth is driving enhancements to the product as well as improvements in customer support, the company said. "Attendance here is a symptom of the broad success SharePoint is having," Gates said to a crowd significantly larger than the one assembled at the conference last year. The company expects to have sold 100 million licenses by July this year, he said.

To help support those users, Microsoft has doubled the number of staff working on SharePoint customer support and plans to double it again in the next six months, said Kurt DelBene, a senior vice president at Microsoft. It is also increasing the number of Microsoft consultants available to help customers implement SharePoint and expanding programs to help potential users figure out how to justify the investment, design the implementation, roll it out, and train users, he said. A new Web site is designed to help users and potential users.

SharePoint users will get a couple of new features too. Those who want to build nicer-looking internal sites on SharePoint will find it easier to use Silverlight to do so. Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint, launched on Monday, is designed to offer some sample code and other support for customers who want to wrap a Silverlight component into their SharePoint pages.

Enterprises that use SharePoint will also be able to employ a free enterprise search product from Microsoft starting on Tuesday. Search Server Express 2008 was announced late last year and is now available.

Even though growth for SharePoint has been good, Microsoft's larger ambition is for the functionality it offers to become available to all workers. Gates compared Microsoft's goals for SharePoint to the company's efforts to encourage more workers in organizations to use Office products. It used to be that IT would allow only certain workers to use Word or Excel. But once Microsoft packaged Word, Excel and PowerPoint into Office, it became a given that if one worker sent a PowerPoint presentation in e-mail, a recipient in the company would be able to view it, Gates said. Microsoft's goal is for workers to take it for granted that they can easily create an internal collaboration site using SharePoint, he said.

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Reuters - Hamas declared victory after Israeli troops pulled out of the Gaza Strip on Monday following a U.S. appeal to end days of fighting that killed more than 100 Palestinians.