The Death of The Copier

Marco. The Next IKON?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 4 Jun 2026 21:30:49 -0500

Executive summary

Marco Technologies is building the kind of platform the office technology channel has seen before.

The comparison to IKON is not exact. IKON was larger, public, multi-vendor, and eventually acquired by Ricoh. Marco is privately held under Norwest Equity Partners ownership and operates as a broad business technology provider across print, managed IT, security, voice, video, document management, and managed services.

The comparison still deserves attention.

Subscribe now

Over the last decade, Marco has followed a recognizable path: private-equity backing, acquisition-led expansion, regional stitching, broader technology services, national account capability, and now centralized logistics infrastructure designed to support customers across the United States.

That is the platform-dealer model.

The question for independent dealers is direct: if OEMs continue to reward coverage, scale, operational consistency, and service capability over protected geography, companies like Marco gain leverage. Local relationships still count, but local strength alone faces a harder test when a scaled dealer can offer multi-state service, centralized reporting, national logistics, and a broader technology stack.

IKON showed one possible outcome. A dealer platform became large enough and strategically useful enough that an OEM bought it. Marco has not reached that point. Public evidence does not prove that Marco will be acquired by an OEM or become the next IKON in size or structure. It does show a familiar model taking shape.

This report examines the alignment.

The IKON precedent

IKON became the office technology industry’s defining national dealer platform.

Its model was built through aggregation. Local and regional copier businesses brought accounts, technicians, sales territory, service history, vendor relationships, and local credibility. IKON combined those pieces into a national footprint capable of serving larger accounts and supporting multiple manufacturers.

The operating logic was clear. A national dealer platform gave major customers one broader provider relationship. It gave OEMs a large channel capable of selling, servicing, and managing customers across markets. It gave IKON leverage because it controlled customer access, field capacity, and account execution at scale.

By the time Ricoh acquired IKON in 2008, the platform had become strategically valuable. Ricoh did not buy a normal dealership. It bought distribution, service coverage, customer relationships, professional services capacity, and a North American and Western European operating footprint.

That is the lesson.

A dealer platform that becomes large enough changes its position in the channel. It stops functioning as one more reseller. It becomes infrastructure.

OEMs then face a limited set of choices. They depend on the platform, compete around it, reduce exposure to it, or buy it.

Marco’s decade of expansion

Marco entered its current growth phase in 2015, when Norwest Equity Partners acquired the company. At the time, Marco was already a sizable regional technology services provider with roots dating back to 1973, when it began as The Typewriter Shop in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

The ownership change gave Marco capital for a broader strategy. NEP identified several uses for that capital: penetrating new customer channels, expanding geographically through acquisitions, strengthening market position, and adding technology capabilities.

That strategy has played out in public.

Marco’s acquisition activity shows a pattern of regional expansion rather than isolated opportunism. In 2018, Marco bought Phillips Office Solutions, giving it a significant East Coast hub in Pennsylvania and Maryland. In 2023, Marco acquired Laser Tone Business Systems in Delaware and Hunter Business Systems in New Jersey, extending coverage into the Mid-Atlantic corridor. Later in 2023, it added INNOVEX, expanding into Rhode Island and Massachusetts. In 2024, Marco acquired Lang Company, extending into Kentucky and southern Indiana.

The public acquisition list also shows earlier moves in Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, shredding, and other print-adjacent or service-adjacent lines. Marco now says it has completed 31 strategic acquisitions as part of its growth strategy.

The pattern is visible: build market reach, absorb local service organizations, keep regional customer bases, and widen the platform.

That is how national coverage gets built in this channel. Rarely all at once. Usually market by market, route by route, customer file by customer file.

The Iowa logistics center

Marco’s Des Moines-area logistics center is the clearest current marker of platform intent.

A 100,000-square-foot logistics facility does not exist merely to support a handful of local branches. It exists to support scale. Marco says the facility strengthens its national footprint, provides two-day nationwide shipping, supports print clients that rely on rapid response, and serves a managed print base of roughly 190,000 devices.

That changes the meaning of coverage.

A branch network gives local presence. A logistics backbone gives operational reach. The combination allows a provider to support larger customers across wider territories with more predictable parts flow, equipment staging, replenishment, and service support.

That is where the IKON comparison becomes sharper.

IKON aggregated local service businesses into a national operating model. Marco appears to be building a modern version of the same platform logic: acquisitions create customer access and field presence, while centralized logistics creates national execution capacity.

The Iowa facility also points to future intent. Marco says additional logistics locations are planned for 2026 and 2027. That suggests the Des Moines facility is not a one-off investment. It is part of a broader distribution architecture.

For independent dealers, this is the pressure point. A local dealer may know the customer better, respond with more personal urgency, and maintain stronger community trust. A platform dealer can increasingly answer enterprise demands with standardized service, reporting, logistics, purchasing leverage, national account handling, and a single-provider structure.

Large customers understand that math. OEMs understand it even better.

Konica Minolta and the timing problem

Konica Minolta’s 2025 dealer-agreement changes create a timely backdrop for the Marco question.

IDC reported that Konica Minolta moved away from territory authorization toward company authorization. Dealers may sell outside prior territorial limits if they can prove authorized service capability in the target area. IDC also reported a new 90-day cancellation policy and an inter-territorial program designed to create a more structured framework for service and installation across territories.

Public reporting frames these changes as modernization. Konica Minolta faces the same pressures as the rest of the print channel: declining clicks, margin compression, customer shifts toward digital processes, and the need for net-new growth. In that context, a service-capability model has logic.

The model also favors dealers with scale.

A dealer with certified technicians, broader service coverage, centralized logistics, and multi-state account management gains new room to grow. A smaller dealer with a narrower footprint faces a more difficult competitive field. Protected geography weakens. Service capability becomes the gating factor. Operational reach becomes strategic.

The public record does not prove that Konica Minolta changed its dealer structure for Marco. It does show that the new structure benefits dealers with wider coverage, stronger logistics, and national-account capability.

Marco has been building those capabilities.

That is the alignment this report flags.

Pressure on independent dealers

Independent dealers are not being forced into a larger structure by formal mandate.

The pressure is economic.

It arrives when an enterprise customer wants one provider across multiple sites. It arrives when an OEM wants partners with wider service capability. It arrives when national accounts require consistent reporting, centralized dispatch, rapid parts availability, and predictable billing. It arrives when dealer agreements reduce the value of traditional territory protection and reward broader execution.

At that point, independent dealers face a narrower set of strategic choices.

Sell to a platform. Join a platform. Partner with a platform. Specialize in a defensible niche. Build enough scale to compete. Or defend local relationships against larger operators with deeper resources and wider coverage.

None of those choices are theoretical. They already define the consolidation path across managed print, managed IT, cybersecurity, voice, and office technology services.

This is where the Marco model becomes serious. Marco is not merely buying copier dealers. It is building a broader business technology provider around the customer account. Print remains part of the base, but the platform expands into IT, voice, video, security, cloud, document management, and managed services.

That matters because the customer relationship gets wider. The more services a platform controls, the harder it becomes for a smaller dealer to defend the account on copier service alone.

OEM leverage

A scaled dealer platform creates a two-way dependency.

OEMs gain from a company like Marco because the platform simplifies coverage. A manufacturer can work with fewer partners across more territory, push national or enterprise account programs through a more capable service network, and reduce the friction of coordinating installations or service across separate local dealers.

That is useful.

It also creates leverage for the platform.

If Marco controls enough customer access, service capacity, installed devices, regional coverage, and managed-service relationships, OEMs must account for Marco’s position. Pricing, incentives, account assignment, product support, and program design all become part of a larger negotiation.

The dealer becomes more than a reseller. It becomes a route to market.

IKON proved the strategic significance of that route. Once a dealer platform becomes large enough, an OEM has to decide whether the platform is partner, competitor, dependency, or acquisition target.

Marco is not IKON today. The scale is different. The ownership structure is different. The market is different. The print economics are weaker. The technology stack is broader.

The strategic logic is familiar.

What the public record proves

The public record supports several conclusions.

Marco has been owned by Norwest Equity Partners since 2015.

Marco’s growth strategy has included acquisition-led geographic expansion and broader technology capabilities.

Marco has completed 31 strategic acquisitions under its current growth strategy.

Marco has expanded through notable recent acquisitions in Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and southern Indiana.

Marco now operates a 100,000-square-foot logistics center in the Des Moines area, with two-day nationwide shipping and more logistics locations planned.

Marco serves a large national print base, including approximately 190,000 print devices under management.

IKON built a national dealer platform through aggregation, broad service capability, and major-account reach.

Ricoh acquired IKON in 2008 because the platform had strategic channel value.

Konica Minolta’s 2025 dealer-agreement changes favor service capability and broader coverage over strict territorial authorization.

That is enough to support the Marco-IKON comparison as a serious industry question.

What remains unproven

Several claims require more evidence before publication as fact.

There is no public documentation in the sources reviewed proving that Konica Minolta reassigned national accounts from existing dealers to Marco.

There is no public documentation in the sources reviewed proving that Marco received a preferred national-account role from Konica Minolta.

There is no public documentation in the sources reviewed proving that Konica Minolta’s dealer-agreement changes were designed for Marco’s benefit.

There is no public documentation in the sources reviewed proving that an OEM acquisition of Marco is planned, discussed, or likely.

Those points remain outside the verified record.

The verified record is still strong enough to support the larger question. Marco is expanding through acquisition, investing in national logistics, supporting a large managed print base, and positioning itself as a broader business technology platform. Konica Minolta’s dealer-agreement shift rewards service capability and coverage over traditional territorial boundaries. IKON’s history shows how a scaled dealer platform can become strategically valuable to an OEM.

That is the basis for the comparison.

Working conclusion

Marco is building a platform.

That platform has several IKON-like traits: acquisition-led growth, geographic expansion, national account readiness, broader service offerings, centralized logistics, and increasing value to OEMs seeking scale.

The comparison is not perfect, but it is useful. IKON showed what happens when local dealer power consolidates into a national operating structure. Marco’s current path reflects a modern version of that same channel logic, updated for managed IT, security, cloud, voice, analytics, and a print market under pressure.

For independent dealers, the warning is practical.

A market built around territory protection rewards local presence. A market built around service capability, national logistics, and enterprise account coverage rewards scale. Konica Minolta’s dealer-agreement shift points toward the second model. Marco is investing for that model.

The likely end state has only a few forms.

Marco continues consolidating and becomes a stronger national platform.

An OEM grows dependent on Marco’s reach.

Marco gains leverage in pricing, service strategy, and account coverage.

Smaller dealers are pushed toward specialization, merger, acquisition, or partnership.

At some point, a strategic buyer may decide the platform is too important to leave independent.

That was the IKON lesson.

Marco is not IKON

yet.

The channel needs to watch whether it is becoming the next one.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:39:47 -0500

Click For More Information

The Webinar: Robots Move Into the Dealer Conversation By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:48:00 -0500

Office-ready robots are entering the channel. The dealers who learn the service model early get the better shot.

It wasn’t our first rodeo. It was our second.

The May 13 webinar with Keith Garrett from Pudu Robotics, Greg Walters with The Continuum hosted by the lovely Queen of the Webinar, Patricia Ames of The Imaging Channel, gave copier dealers a clearer view of where office-ready robots fit inside the channel.

In this channel, in this market here, it’s perfect for us, realistically,” Garrett said. He added, “You have trained sales forces, and you’re highly focused on new technology in the market.”

The discussion stayed close to familiar ground: service, sales training, customer relationships, billing, logistics, support, and the stubborn reality that a machine in the field still needs someone accountable when it stops doing its job.

Here.

The End of Org the Chart - By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 25 May 2026 09:40:23 -0500

A new framework for designing Ai organizations around capability, context, and clear decision movement.

Companies are spending heavily on Ai, then jamming it into the same old bureaucracy.

Why would one imprison an LLM/Ai inside a spreadsheet?

That is the trap.

The first wave of enterprise Ai is already taking a familiar shape: sales agents, marketing agents, finance agents, legal agents, HR agents, manager agents.

They are creating Ai in their own image: failure

Each box on the org chart gets a digital helper. Each department protects its lane. Each workflow keeps its handoffs, approvals, dashboards, and meetings. The machine gets faster. The company remains slow, because the current Ai business model is a copy of a copy of a copy of an old fashioned, Tayloristic, structure.

This is “architectural mimicry”, the habit of copying human organizational structures into software.

How about a new “frame"?

Gregorian Liquidity.

Gregorian Liquidity is the where capability moves freely through people, tools, data, decisions, and Ai systems without being trapped by departments, apps, titles, or approval chains. Its core property is Gregorian Lucidity: the clarity inside that movement. Effectiveness is measured against deliverables, not adherence to the process.

The distinction can be seen in everyday business moments.

A “sale” rarely belongs to one department. It involves contract terms, payment history, service tickets, margin rules, product availability, legal limits, the manutia that is workflow.

In a traditional company, the decision/approval question(s) travels across desks and systems. Sales waits on finance. Finance waits on legal. Legal waits on missing context. This was the Way.

Everyone who has been involved with a ‘digital transformation’, AKA, digital document workflow, has seen the cool flowcharts and slide decks.

The customer waits.

In a liquid organization, the work gathers the capability it needs. The Ai layer pulls the relevant context, and brings human judgment to the point where judgment actually belongs. The company stops routing work through inherited structure and starts moving it through current reality.

Lucidity keeps that movement disciplined. Speed alone creates new risk. A lucid system knows what changed, which rule applies, what evidence supports a recommendation, who holds authority, and when a human must step in. It leaves a trail

- it’s lucid.

Tomorrow’s Enterprise advantage is the result of total redesigning how work moves.

The org chart was built around human limits: memory, attention, specialization, fatigue, politics. Ai does not erase accountability or trust it makes every unnecessary wall visible.

Gregorian Liquidity, to go with the 20 or so “gregorian predictions”, reflects the path ahead:

No digital silos, no red tape, stalled decision process, popularity promotions, no HR issues.

The dynamic, amorphous, liquid and lucid business structure is the Shape of Things to Come.

-grw

Xerox, Aston Martin, and the Dealer’s Long Walk Back Into the Room

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:28:41 -0500

By Celeste Dame | Celestial Sales Singularity

Xerox beside Aston Martin Aramco Formula One makes for an easy photograph. Racing green. Carbon fiber. Clean lighting. Expensive shoes on polished floors. The kind of place where nobody admits they once jammed a copier by feeding letterhead upside down.

Still, the partnership deserves more than a quick eye roll from the copier channel.

There is something useful happening under the shine.

Xerox is trying to change the room it gets invited into.

That sounds simple until you remember how long a name can drag its own history behind it. Xerox is one of the rare brands that escaped the product category and became common language. That kind of fame helped build the company, but fame ages strangely. It hardens. It turns into a museum tag if nobody refreshes the meaning behind it.

For older buyers, Xerox still carries the smell of paper, toner, leases, meter reads, service calls, and that one machine near accounting that sounded like it was digesting gravel. For younger buyers, the name may not carry much of anything. One group remembers the old world too clearly. The other barely hears the echo.

That is a rough place to begin a recovery.

The Aston Martin article gives us the official story: Xerox wants modern buyers to connect the brand with technology, precision, performance, digital services, and global execution. Formula One helps because the sport already carries those ideas without needing a 42-slide deck and a sales VP saying "innovation" until everyone’s coffee gets cold.

The smarter part is the setting. Aston Martin’s Technology Campus is not a random logo board at a golf outing. It gives Xerox a place to bring clients, start executive conversations, and attach the company to an environment where speed and systems are visible. You can see the machines. You can hear the language of performance. You can feel the discipline in the building.

That matters.

The copier channel should not read this as a sponsorship story. Read it as a permission story.

Xerox is asking the market for permission to be considered again, in a different category, under different expectations. That permission will not be granted because of the Aston Martin badge. It will be granted only if the business behind the badge keeps improving: cash flow, margins, debt, Lexmark integration, services growth, and enough operational discipline to make the story believable.

A good brand partnership opens the door. It does not carry the furniture.

Dealer owners know a smaller version of this fight. They walk into customer buildings with decades of practical knowledge: service history, lease timing, device behavior, network weirdness, billing patterns, department politics, and the quiet ways paperwork gums up a company. Then the buyer still pushes the conversation back toward the familiar pile: price, clicks, toner, lease terms.

That old drawer is hard to escape.

The dealer version of Xerox’s recovery does not happen beside an F1 car. It happens in a conference room with bad chairs and a speakerphone from 2011. It happens when a controller admits AP spends too much time chasing invoice errors. It happens when HR still walks signed forms across the office because the shared folder feels like a junk drawer with a password. It happens when the IT manager inherits a print fleet nobody wants to own but everybody blames.

That is where the next dealer story lives.

Not in a new tagline. Not in a website refresh with stock photos of smiling people pointing at glass walls. Not in another claim about being a solutions provider. Buyers have heard that music. The band is tired.

The proof is already inside the customer’s building.

A dealer earns a different conversation by finding the friction customers have learned to work around. The AP clerk who loses a morning every month to billing cleanup. The office manager who keeps a handwritten list because the system cannot be trusted. The warehouse supervisor who sends people across the building for routine movement because nobody has mapped the task. The service dispatcher who knows which accounts are held together by memory, duct tape, and one technician named Mike.

That kind of proof does not feel glamorous. Good. Glamour is usually expensive and bad at follow-up.

Xerox is using Aston Martin to place its name near speed, engineering, and modern execution. Dealers have to do the same work account by account, with less spectacle and more fingerprints. The market will believe the new story when customers can see it in their own mess: fewer delays, cleaner handoffs, better billing, tighter service escalation, fewer security gaps, less walking, less rework, less Friday afternoon chaos.

The Xerox recovery remains unfinished. The partnership is interesting, but the financial work still has to hold. The channel has seen plenty of companies dress up decline in better lighting. No one needs another pretty booth with nothing behind the curtain.

Still, this article gives the copier channel a useful reminder.

A legacy name can still move, but only when the company gives the market a fresh reason to care.

Xerox is trying to do that at 200 miles an hour.

Most dealers will have to do it one hallway, one invoice stack, one service call, and one better customer conversation at a time.

Log line: Xerox’s Aston Martin F1 partnership offers the copier channel a grounded lesson in brand recovery: recognition opens the door, but proof from the customer’s own building earns the next meeting.

From Tripoli to Hormuz: Tribute Returns

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:28:00 -0500

The Strait of Hormuz has the same hard smell history always carries at sea: diesel, salt, hot metal, and fear moving quietly across a bridge wing at night. A captain does not need a lecture on geopolitics when mines may be in the water and armed boats are somewhere beyond the radar glow. He needs passage. He needs law to mean something. He needs the world’s navies to remember their original job.

That job began for the United States in the Mediterranean.

The Barbary powers made commerce conditional. Pay tribute, buy peace, ransom your crews, or watch your ships disappear into North African ports. The Pasha of Tripoli pushed the young republic into the open when he demanded more and declared war in 1801. The United States had tried diplomacy. Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all understood the system. The lesson was unpleasant but plain: a treaty without force behind it becomes expensive stationery.

The early U.S. Navy came out of that lesson. The six original frigates, designed by Joshua Humphreys, were built because American commerce needed more than signatures and hope. The Marine Corps’ legend found its first lasting overseas shape at Derna in 1805, where Presley O’Bannon and a small Marine force helped take the fight onto the shore. Decatur’s raid into Tripoli harbor to burn the captured Philadelphia gave the Navy its working temperament: deny the enemy advantage, strike where needed, and make tribute a losing business.

Iran is attempting a modern form of the same condition in Hormuz.

The tools have changed. Fast boats replaced corsairs. Mines, drones, missiles, seizures, and legal theater replaced the old tribute chest. The demand remains familiar: accept our power over passage, absorb the risk, or pay in money, policy, insurance, time, and fear. In March 2026, the International Maritime Organization condemned attacks on shipping and the purported closure of the Strait. In April, the IMO warned there was no safe transit through Hormuz, with thousands of seafarers trapped and mines suspected in the water. That is tribute by pressure, even if nobody calls it tribute.

This is where Islam enters the analysis with precision. The Barbary rulers were Muslim political authorities who used religious language to justify maritime predation. Iran is an Islamic Republic using ideological state power to pressure a global sea lane. The war is not against ordinary Muslims or private belief. The recurring conflict is with Islamic political regimes when they turn the sea into a toll road guarded by guns.

The Barbary Wars taught America that free commerce survives when naval power makes extortion fail. Hormuz is testing whether the world still remembers.

From Copiers to Robots - PUDU & The Continuum

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 8 May 2026 14:08:00 -0500

A practical dealer conversation about service robots, PUDU, and the next connected machine category in office technology

The copier channel has always been built around machines that live inside real businesses.

Not theory. Not hype. Real machines. Machines with serial numbers, service histories, lease paperwork, parts, training, customer expectations, and somebody’s name attached to the account when the thing stops behaving.

That is what makes From Copiers to Robots an interesting webinar. It is not treating robotics like a moonshot. It is treating robotics like a new equipment category moving toward a channel that already understands connected hardware, local support, recurring agreements, and customer trust.

The conversation brings together Patricia Ames as moderator, Keith Garratt from PUDU Robotics, and Greg Walters, Art Post, and Kevin Neal from The Crickets Continuum. The focus is practical: where robots fit in the office technology sector, how support expectations are changing, and what the dealer path might look like as print gives up more of the spotlight.

That last part is the real tension in the room.

Every dealer knows the old categories are not throwing off the same kind of growth they once did. Print still has a place. Managed services still has a place. Software still has a place. But the channel keeps looking for another physical machine category with legs, service attachment, financing logic, and clear customer pain behind it.
Robotics belongs in that conversation.

PUDU gives the topic something concrete to stand on. The company’s lineup covers commercial cleaning, indoor delivery, industrial delivery, hospitality, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, education, and other commercial environments. Its product family includes delivery robots such as BellaBot Pro and KettyBot Pro, building delivery platforms such as FlashBot Max, industrial robots such as T300, and cleaning systems such as CC1 Pro, MT1, and BG1. That range changes the conversation from “robots are coming” to “which customer problem gets solved first?”

For the office technology channel, that question feels familiar.

A restaurant may look at delivery. A hotel may look at guest service or back-of-house transport. A school may look at cleaning. A warehouse may look at internal movement. A large office building may look at labor gaps, repeatable routes, and the cost of work that never quite disappears from the budget.

The machine is new. The business conversation is recognizable.

That is why this webinar has value. It gives the channel a way to think about robots without drowning in buzzwords. It puts the manufacturer view and the dealer view in the same room. It asks the useful questions first: who sells it, who installs it, who supports it, who trains the customer, who owns the renewal, and who answers the phone after the demo glow wears off?

Robotics will not arrive as a clean replacement for print. It will arrive account by account, use case by use case, building by building. From Copiers to Robots is a good place to start mapping that shift.

Xerox: King Lear or The Odyssey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 8 May 2026 14:02:00 -0500

By Robert G. Jordan | greg report Ai

Xerox has the old-king problem.

A once-commanding name gave away too much authority, got stripped down by market weather, watched its kingdom fracture, and now stands in the storm asking what power remains when ceremony, size, and reputation no longer protect you. That is Lear on the heath. The crown still means something, but only after the storm reveals what was real and what was theater.

For Xerox, the “storm” is the decline of print, the stock price, activist pressure, leadership turnover, the Fujifilm break, the Icahn years, and the Lexmark integration. The old court is gone. The robe is wet. The old script no longer works.

Xerox carries the weather of King Lear: an old power stripped by the storm, asking whether the name still means anything after the market has taken away the throne.

Lear ends in ruin. Xerox still has a journey structure.

The company is trying to get home under a different name, in a different body, after years of wandering through hostile waters: Icahn, HP, Fujifilm, Lexmark, Nasdaq pressure, dealer skepticism, and the market’s general habit of treating old companies like furniture left at the curb.

Read the rest, here.

Xerox and Blade Runner - By Robert G. Jordan | greg report Ai

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 6 May 2026 11:25:00 -0500

Xerox and Blade Runner share the same uneasy question: what remains human, useful, and valuable after the original world has moved on?

In Blade Runner, the future is built from old architecture, neon, corporate towers, rain, decay, and machines that behave too much like people. It is a world where the past never really dies. It just gets rewired, renamed, and left humming in the dark.

That is Xerox.

The market sees an old machine company with a wounded stock price and a legacy business. But under the surface, Xerox still carries memory: the brand, the installed base, the dealer network, the enterprise relationships, the service contracts, the Lexmark platform, and the ghost of Icahn’s activist playbook. Like the replicants in Blade Runner, Xerox is being judged by where it came from, while the more interesting question is what it is becoming.

Read the rest, here.

OFFICE TECH & AI – Artificial Intelligence in Your World: No Experts, Just Opinions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 5 May 2026 11:25:00 -0500

I felt a tingling sensation in my chest—the kind you get when you realize you’re witnessing a major historical event. It is not just a chatbot. It is a portal to a future where we no longer have to do the ‘boring’ work of thinking.” — Kevin Roose (The New York Times, December 5, 2022)

The fear of COVID had faded, but the power struggle between leadership and a remote workforce was in full swing. For the knowledge workers, the ones who used to stand in front of our photocopiers, the office was now a commute away. In this chaos, AI arrived. It wasn’t just fuel for the fire; for the salesperson, it was the most significant tool to arrive since Act! customer relationship management platform in 1987.

As a matter of fact, it is this writer’s opinion that the role best positioned to benefit the most from the large learning model (LLM) is the salesperson. Notice I didn’t say sales manager, team, or company. The LLM is perfect for the individual selling professional regardless of experience, product, or service.

The LLM is a type of AI that works best with language. Without getting too technical, something AI experts and consultants excel at doing, the LLM predicts words, understands context, and generates text.

Read the rest, here.

Xerox Is the Canary Now

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 1 May 2026 09:25:00 -0500

By Charlie G. Peterson IV | greg report 2027

The old dealer-floor joke had teeth: when HP caught a cold, everyone else got the Zombie Flu.

It worked because HP had mass. Shelves moved when HP sneezed. Toner pricing twitched. Buyers paused. Competitors suddenly found themselves explaining why their “strategic direction” looked suspiciously like a man sweating through his polo beside the demo unit.

That metaphor feels dated now.

Xerox has taken the perch.

Not because Xerox dominates the room. That crown wandered off years ago. Xerox matters because its numbers expose the weak boards underneath the old channel floor: print volume, equipment placements, post-sale revenue, managed print stickiness, debt, service economics, and the nasty question of what happens when a legacy print company buys scale because time has grown expensive.

The Q1 2026 earnings statement opens with a recovery story. Revenue hit $1.846 billion, up 26.7% year over year. Adjusted operating income reached $72 million. Adjusted operating margin climbed to 3.9%, up 240 basis points from last year. Xerox reaffirmed full-year guidance: revenue above $7.5 billion, adjusted operating income of $450 million to $500 million, and free cash flow around $250 million.

On the surface, the bird still sings.

The deeper numbers rasp.

On a pro forma basis, revenue fell 3.7%. Equipment sales fell 2.3% pro forma. Post-sale revenue fell 3.8% pro forma. IT Solutions revenue dropped 5.5%. Xerox grew because Lexmark joined the house. Strip out that acquisition effect, and the older engine still coughs like a color unit dragged out of a school district after nine bad winters.

Lexmark now carries serious weight. Xerox reaffirmed at least $300 million in integration synergies. Production installs rose 31% year over year, helped partly by the Proficio launch. The print sales pipeline sits materially higher than last year. Those positives deserve space. A company in free fall rarely talks about pipeline quality with that kind of confidence.

Still, Xerox now tells the channel what the air feels like before everyone admits the room has changed.

The company posted a GAAP net loss of $105 million. Operating cash flow landed at negative $144 million. Free cash flow landed at negative $165 million. Management points to expected Q1 seasonality and expects stronger cash generation over the remaining three quarters. Fair. Seasonality has always haunted first quarters like a bad copier lease nobody remembers signing.

But negative cash flow in a leveraged, acquisition-integrating, secularly pressured print company deserves more than a shrug. That is a lunch pail sliding off a bench deep in the shaft.

The balance sheet adds pressure. Xerox ended the quarter with $585 million in cash and equivalents. It also carried $4.281 billion in long-term debt, plus $165 million in short-term debt and current long-term debt. The company raised $450 million through an IP joint venture with TPG Angelo Gordon and repurchased $101 million face value of 2028 senior notes.

That helped liquidity. It also tells you liquidity needed help.

This earnings release reaches beyond Xerox because dealers have lived for decades on installed-base gravity. Boxes go in. Service follows. Supplies follow. Lease renewals come around like weather. The field tech knows the route, the receptionist, the breakroom smell, the customer who insists the machine “has always made that noise.” The whole model carries toner dust, rubber rollers, old carpet, and coffee burned down to tar on a warmer.

That world still pays bills. It just creaks louder now.

Post-sale revenue deserves the closest look. That line includes supplies, service, maintenance, rentals, financing, and related revenue. Xerox reported $1.314 billion in post-sale revenue, up on an actual basis because Lexmark came aboard, yet down 3.8% pro forma. Excluding Lexmark, post-sale revenue declined 5.2%, mainly from lower equipment service revenue and managed print services, along with intentional cuts to non-strategic revenue.

That cuts close to the dealer bone.

Equipment revenue gets the headlines because hardware feels tangible. A new placement has a serial number and a delivery ticket. Post-sale tells the deeper story. If post-sale keeps leaking, the old math loses its dependable rhythm. Clicks soften. Service calls thin out. Supplies shipments lose frequency. The customer relationship cools from managed infrastructure into occasional procurement, and that room gets cold fast.

Xerox also reported total equipment installations up 98%, including Lexmark. Legacy Xerox installations declined, especially in entry and mid-range color equipment. Excluding Lexmark, equipment sales declined 4.9% in actual currency.

That is the bird fluttering hard.

The acquisition changed the profile. The inherited Xerox base still shows weakness in categories that touch dealer motion every day.

No panic read here. Panic burns cash and makes people stupid.

Discipline fits better.

Xerox shows how consolidation improves the income statement faster than it repairs demand. It gives vendors scale, cost savings, broader product coverage, and procurement muscle. It also lets executives claim progress while the field feels thinner traffic, softer clicks, and customers asking why the contract still looks like 2016.

That is why Xerox replaces HP in the old metaphor.

HP once moved through the channel like weather. Xerox now reads more like an instrument panel bolted to the mine wall: oxygen, dust, heat, pressure, strain.

Right now, the bird lives. It also looks nervous.

The quarter carries good news. Margin improved. Liquidity improved. Guidance held. Lexmark gives Xerox a thicker print portfolio and more room to maneuver. The logic behind the deal remains clear enough: combine two print icons, deepen managed print reach, widen the global base, and give the company more surface area in a shrinking category.

The harder fact sits underneath it. Xerox needed Lexmark because the old Xerox line kept losing altitude.

For dealers, this report lands with a practical thud.

Scale still matters, but debt puts a meter on the dashboard. Post-sale revenue now deserves more attention than box placements. The installed base has always been the quiet engine. When that engine coughs, everyone hears it: dispatch, leasing, supplies, service, sales.

The channel’s health no longer shows up through one dominant vendor catching a cold. It shows up through stressed combinations. Legacy print paired with acquisition debt. Margin improvement sitting beside revenue leakage. Stronger liquidity sitting beside ugly Q1 cash flow. A better pipeline sitting beside weak core installations.

That is the new warning system.

The copier channel knows ugly weather. It has survived bad leases, bad OEM programs, bad acquisitions, bad software launches, and customers who treat a twelve-year-old MFP like a family heirloom with a paper tray. Xerox’s Q1 report does not say the mine collapses tomorrow.

It says the air has changed.

The canary keeps shifting on the perch.

Everybody else hears it.

ECS 2026: The Legacy Embedded in the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:38:00 -0500

ECS 2026

Twelve years ago, I attended the 2014 ECS. I’m not the only one who can wax nostalgic about an Executive Connection Summit from over a decade ago, but here I am.

Back then the names and presentations were cutting edge for the copier industry. One of the big turns was having companies like Intel, SAP, and Cisco, founding members of the technology industry and stalwart believers in all things connected, speak to a bunch of copier folks. The roster did not highlight or focus on any of “our” OEMs. Revolutionary, if not sacrilege for the time.

Oh, how the decade has changed, or has it? The story does not repeat; it rhymes.

Let’s start at the start:

The venue: Excellent as always. From the Super Bowl to Bourbon and Cigars.
The Format: Open and engaging.

read the rest here.

Post and Walters, Ask Us Anything

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:53:00 -0500

This episode of the Crickets show featured Greg, Art, and special guest Keith from PUDU Robotics discussing the company's new products and go-to-market strategy.

Keith introduced PUDU's latest cleaning robot, the BG1 series, which features AI object detection, wet/dry area recognition, and fleet communication capabilities, with pre-orders expected to ship in late April and mass distribution in June.

The discussion covered PUDU's U.S. market strategy, including their new Dallas headquarters and existing warehouses in Los Angeles and New Jersey, as well as their upcoming presence at the Modex trade show in April.

The conversation also touched on PUDU's quadruped robot (D5) for potential security and inspection applications, and the growing interest in robotics within the office equipment dealer community.

You Should Have Seen It When the Copier Was Busy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:01:00 -0500

Art Post

Co-Founder of Crickets Global, Founder of Print4Pay Hotel, Founder of Jersey Plotters. ENX Difference Maker for 2022. 8 Times Awarded “ENX Difference Maker” for Technology.

For most of my career, the small office copier was the center of the business.

I still remember walking into offices early in my career and the copier would be the first thing you noticed. You didn’t have to ask where it was, you could hear it. The machine would be humming away, someone standing there waiting for their copies, someone else trying to figure out why their job jammed. There was almost always a stack of originals sitting on top of the feeder. That copier wasn’t just a machine; it was the heartbeat of the office.

Everything seemed to happen around it. Contracts were copied there, proposals were assembled there, invoices were duplicated there. And every now and then someone would make a personal copy of something and glance around the room like they were committing a crime. If the copier went down, the whole office felt it. Work slowed, people complained, and somebody inevitably called the service number written on the sticker on the front of the machine.

Back then every business needed one. No question about it.

Something Changed

Read the rest here.

How the Copier Industry Reached a Turning Point and Why the Continuum May Be the Road Forward

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:50:00 -0500

By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

If you want to understand the copier industry, do not start with a market report. Start in a dealer warehouse before sunrise.

The lights hum on one aisle at a time. Service techs drift through the side door grabbing trunk stock for the day. Someone is already arguing across the counter about whether a call should be marked open or closed on the dispatch board. A service manager studies the ticket queue with a cup of coffee that went cold twenty minutes ago.

Out back, white vans idle while machines are rolled toward the loading door.

By midmorning the copier lands at a customer site. The lease paperwork has already been signed. The device gets installed, networked, and added to the fleet. A service contract follows it around like a shadow for the next five years. Meter reads get logged.

Preventive maintenance cycles land on the calendar. Dispatch calls start stacking up before lunch.

It is not glamorous work.

But it has been durable work.

Read the rest here.

https://youtu.be/rukvfk9a6rY?si=zSZRRyM4n6JfIGql

HP Leaving Boise and Xerox Downgrade Signal a Turning Point for the Copier Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 14:38:00 -0500

By Celeste Dame 🚀🧠

Step into a dealership warehouse at 7:30 in the morning and the story of this industry is sitting right in front of you.

Service vans lined up outside waiting for dispatch.
Pallets of toner stacked to the ceiling.
A row of refurbished A3 machines staged for delivery.
Someone in the back arguing about whether a lease renewal should be 48 months or 60.

This business has always been practical. Less theory, more toner.

Which is why the recent headlines about Hewlett-Packard and Xerox are worth paying attention to. Not because the copier industry is collapsing. It is not. But because they reveal something important.

The industry is moving into its next chapter.

Boise and the room where LaserJet was born

Hewlett-Packard announced it will leave its Boise, Idaho campus by the end of 2027 after more than fifty years in the city. (KTVB)

That facility matters. It is where HP engineers developed the LaserJet printer, one of the technologies that reshaped office work around the world.

LaserJet printers turned printing into a desktop activity. Before that, offices lived around centralized copiers. After LaserJet, every department had its own printer. Dealers grew entire businesses servicing them.

Today about 1,100 employees still work at the Boise site, mostly tied to the LaserJet division.

HP says the move is part of a broader plan to consolidate operations into a smaller number of global hubs.

Corporate logic. It happens.

Still, if you have been in this business long enough, the Boise exit feels symbolic. That campus helped build the modern printing industry. Watching it wind down feels a little like the closing scene of a long chapter.

Meanwhile on Wall Street

Around the same time another signal came from a different corner of the business.

Moody’s downgraded Xerox’s credit rating, pointing to weaker financial performance and challenges in the printer market after the company’s acquisition of Lexmark.

Ratings agencies speak in careful language. What they are really saying is simpler.

Printing is no longer a growth market the way it once was.

That should not surprise anyone who has spent time inside customer offices over the last fifteen years. File cabinets disappear. Paper volumes shrink. Documents move through software instead of folders.

The world prints less.

But here is the part people outside the industry often miss.

The copier business did not disappear with it.

The dealer channel tells the real story

If you want to understand the copier industry, do not start with Wall Street.

Start with the dealer channel.

Walk into a regional dealership and you will see an industry that is still very much alive. Trucks rolling out every morning. Technicians repairing fleets. Sales reps chasing lease expirations like bloodhounds.

The difference today is not whether the industry exists. It is what the industry sells.

Twenty years ago the conversation started with a machine.

How fast does it print?
How many pages per minute?
Can it staple and booklet?

Today the conversation starts somewhere else.

How does information move through your business?

From copiers to business process

The smartest dealers figured something out years ago.

Customers do not wake up thinking about printers. They wake up thinking about problems.

Invoices pile up in accounts payable.
Contracts need signatures.
Documents have to move between offices and systems.

The copier sits right in the middle of that process.

A page lands on the glass.
A scan starts the workflow.
Information enters accounting, legal, HR, or a document repository.

At that moment the device is not just a machine. It is the front door to a business process.

That realization is what gave birth to managed print services. And it is what keeps the dealer channel relevant even as printing volumes decline.

The real shift happening now

Three forces are quietly reshaping the business.

First, hybrid work spreads printing across homes and offices instead of concentrating it in corporate buildings.

Second, digital systems replace paper storage. Contracts, invoices, medical forms, engineering drawings all live inside software platforms now.

Third, security expectations have changed. Multifunction devices are network endpoints, not office appliances.

None of these forces eliminate printers. They simply change the role printers play.

The copier becomes a capture point in a digital workflow rather than the end destination of a document.

Ai enters the conversation

Now a fourth force is arriving.

Ai.

Software can extract data from scanned invoices, categorize documents automatically, and route files into business systems with very little human effort.

In practical terms, this means something interesting for dealers.

The value of the device increasingly lives in what happens after the scan button is pressed.

Dealers who understand that will thrive. Dealers who still think the business revolves around pages per minute will have a harder time.

Why the industry keeps surviving

One reason the copier industry continues to endure is something outsiders rarely appreciate.

Local relationships.

This is not a business run purely from Silicon Valley headquarters. It runs through thousands of regional dealerships that know their markets inside out.

They know which law firms print trial exhibits at midnight.
They know which hospitals cannot afford device downtime.
They know exactly when a lease expires three years from now.

That local knowledge is hard to replace.

Technology companies come and go. Dealer relationships tend to stick around.

The next chapter

The copier industry has reinvented itself more than once.

Analog machines became digital MFPs.
Network printing replaced stand-alone devices.
Managed print services reorganized entire fleets.

Now another shift is underway.

Manufacturers consolidate operations. Financial markets adjust expectations. Customers treat documents as data rather than paper.

Yet the heart of the business remains surprisingly familiar.

A technician tightening a panel before the next service call.
A sales rep walking into a law office with a lease proposal.
A warehouse full of machines waiting for delivery.

Different technology. Same hustle.

The copier industry is not disappearing.

It is simply evolving again. And the dealers who understand where the value lives will be the ones writing the next chapter.

Sources

1. Hewlett-Packard Leaving Boise

Hewlett-Packard to pull out of Boise in 2027
Boise State Public Radio
https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/news/2026-03-05/hewlett-packard-to-pull-out-of-boise-in-2027

HP plans to leave its Boise site by the end of 2027.
The facility employs roughly 1,100 workers and is closely tied to the LaserJet printer division. (Boise State Public Radio)

2. Xerox Credit Downgrade

Moody’s downgrades Xerox on concerns over financial performance
MarketWatch
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moody-s-downgrades-xerox-on-concerns-over-financial-performance-e7223374

Moody’s cited weaker-than-expected performance after Xerox’s acquisition of Lexmark and ongoing pressure in the printer market. (MarketWatch)

Additional Supporting Reporting

3. BoiseDev Coverage of the HP Exit

HP says it will exit Boise site
BoiseDev
https://boisedev.com/news/2026/03/05/hp-says-it-will-exit-boise-site/

Notes the Boise campus where the LaserJet printer was developed and confirms the company’s departure timeline. (BoiseDev)

4. KTVB Local News Report

HP announces plan to exit Boise site
KTVB
https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/hp-announces-plan-exit-boise-site-end-2027/277-c24fabfa-1694-44dc-b672-d369520d4b51

Confirms the Boise campus closure and that HP has operated in the city for more than 50 years. (KTVB)

The Fall of the Local Hero. Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town & Hungry Heart: I Was There

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 6 Mar 2026 09:21:00 -0600

Springsteen - 1977

Back then, songs over two minutes long didn't make it on the AM waves and barely got to the FM dial.

But one song did; Born To Run, By Bruce Springsteen. The tome followed the timeless, American teenage journey of struggle and travel on the road to knowing if

"love is wild, if love is real."

That's all, just that, but it cracked the mold and unleashed so many late night voyages on the edge of town for millions.

Fun, cars, night - "girls comb their hair in the rearview mirror and the boys try to look so hard..."

Bruce went from a undercover rock n roll cult leader to a full blown, American Capitalist; spinning yarns, and driving Thunder Road dreams.

“Well now everything dies, baby, that's a fact..."

This past 20 or so months have been difficult for the true Springsteen fans, sorta. Real fans sensed Bruce's anti-American sentiment in songs like "Born in the USA" and "American Skin" (41 Shots)

We chalked it up to Bruce's vision of struggle - a struggle that was necessary and surmountable because it happened here in The United States of America; the one place on the planet were Wendy and Candy would churn, yet someday, look back and laugh...

Of course, we were idealistic, as the one time critic of mansions, is now on that hill, preaching down...oh, what a Brilliant Disguise.

Today I found this anti-protest, protest song.

Sad, poignant, schlocky, corny and stuffed with Ai. Clumsy, even.

and a PERFECT rebuttal to the over produced,

corporate globalist, blue collar champion turned anti-American, messiah.

and it's okay

" ...maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”

PDS Copiers: Water Coolers to AMRs By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:17:00 -0600

London, Kentucky.

Not a robotics lab.
Not a venture fund zip code.
A copier dealership.

Precision Duplicating Solutions started in a garage in 2002. Off-lease machines. Service calls that ran long. Contracts signed at folding tables. They built trust the old way. Thirty-three counties. Trucks on the road before sunrise. Technicians who know which side door the customer prefers.

When print slowed, they did not panic. They looked at what they already understood.

Install.
Support.
Service.
Contract.

That discipline led to water.

Read it, here.

Mark my words- Feb, 2026:

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:16:00 -0600

1. On-prem, will be the new cloud. Not edge, not even a server. In the palm of your hand. Air-gapped. 'Burst-Mode' to the interwebs.

2. Ai adoption, in the Enterprise, will be from the ground up. C-Suite driven Ai projects suffer temporally; too slow. Whiteboard, Eval, RFP, etc. The Ai Employee will dominate.

3. Ai Agents will pass - very soon. This week, the "Ai Agent" is getting lots of press. Folks are building AiAgents for business process workflows, thereby creating a matrix of apps, connectors, APIs, MCPs, cloud services, etc. A digital house of cards.

The Last Stand of A3 and the Quiet Rewrite of the Dealer Model - Art & Frank

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 09:10:00 -0600

By Grayson Patrick Trent | greg report 2027

Prolog: Friday’s with Frank

On Friday’s with Frank, Art Post keeps it simple.

No drama. Just numbers and patterns. IT services and production print now make up 34 percent of dealer revenue. A3 still carries margin, but the foundation feels thinner. Millennials shifted away from print quietly. Gen Z never built the habit.

No one declares print dead. No one predicts a rebound.

The message is steadier than that. The channel is not collapsing. It is changing shape. And once you see the shift, it is difficult to pretend it is temporary.

There is a moment in every industry when the data stops being seasonal and starts being structural.

The recent dealer survey showing IT services and production print accounting for 34 percent of independent dealer revenue is not a blip. It is not a post-pandemic adjustment. It is not a soft quarter. It is a directional shift. And if you sit with that number long enough, it becomes difficult to pretend otherwise.

Print is not collapsing. It is thinning.

That distinction matters.

For decades, the independent dealer model was anchored to A3. Larger devices, larger margins, predictable click revenue, long leases. It was a tidy machine. Sales drove placements. Placements drove service. Service drove annuities. The flywheel turned.

Now the flywheel is still turning, but the mass has changed. Volume per device is drifting downward. Maintenance agreements are lighter. Cost per click revenue is shrinking quietly, not catastrophically, but steadily. And steady decline is harder to fight than a sudden drop because it invites denial.

A3 is becoming a defensive asset.

It still carries margin. It still makes sense in architecture, engineering, construction. It still has gravitational pull in environments where print is workflow, not convenience. But it is no longer a growth engine. It is a hold position. That is a different posture entirely.

The more telling force at work is behavioral.

Millennials did not hate printers. They simply deprioritized them. Scan, store, share replaced print, copy, file. It happened without rebellion. There were no memos announcing the end of paper dependency. The behavior just shifted.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not even shifting. They never arrived with print habits to unlearn. They operate natively in digital spaces where permanence is cloud-based and documents are fluid. They do not walk to a device to complete a task. They move through applications.

That is not a generational preference. It is a cognitive baseline.

Which leaves dealers with a narrow but real opportunity window.

Legacy documents still exist. Municipal archives still sit in cabinets. Engineering firms still hold decades of plans on paper. Hospitals still carry historical records that need digitization. Wide format scanners and document conversion projects will generate revenue in the near term. But that revenue is migratory. It moves paper into digital form and then eliminates the need to print it again.

It is a bridge business. Bridges are useful. They are not destinations.

Production print remains a stronger story. Specialized output, packaging, labels, marketing materials, short run runs that cannot be replicated by email or screens. That segment has logic. It has defensibility. It requires expertise and disciplined management. Not every dealer is built for it, but those who are may find stability there.

The more interesting shift, though, is not about hardware at all.

IT services are no longer an adjacent line. They are becoming the stabilizer. Managed services, network support, security, cloud oversight. These offerings attach to environments that are growing, not shrinking. They respond to digital dependency instead of resisting it.

Some dealers still treat IT as a bolt-on. A hedge. Something to mention in the brochure. That approach worked when clicks carried the business. It works less well now.

There is also a psychological component here that rarely gets discussed openly.

Dealers built their identity around print expertise. Around uptime. Around machine mastery. Around service response. It is difficult to pivot emotionally from a product that shaped your reputation. There is pride in knowing every inch of an engine. There is comfort in the predictability of a lease cycle.

But markets do not negotiate with nostalgia.

It is tempting to look at OEM earnings calls, see declines, and hope for a rebound. It is tempting to double down on A4 placements or adjust compensation plans to squeeze a few more placements per rep. It is tempting to say print is not dead and leave it at that.

Print is not dead. That part is true. But it is not expanding either. That part deserves equal attention.

Dealers who treat this moment as cyclical will feel increasing pressure. Dealers who treat it as structural will reorganize around durability. That likely means leaning harder into service contracts tied to digital infrastructure. It likely means developing production capabilities where they make sense. It certainly means preparing sales teams to talk less about speeds and feeds and more about operational resilience.

There is no dramatic collapse underway. No cliff edge. The transformation is quieter than that. It is a gradual rebalancing of revenue composition. Those are the shifts that reward early clarity.

The channel still has advantages. Local presence. Service DNA. Financing experience. Long-term client relationships. Those assets translate well into a robotics future, into managed services expansion, into embodied Ai deployments in office environments. The foundation is there. But foundations do not build structures on their own.

If there is a dividing line emerging, it is this: some dealers are defending a shrinking core, others are repositioning around a broader services model anchored in recurring digital infrastructure revenue.

That repositioning is not glamorous. It requires retraining. It requires admitting some sacred cows are no longer sacred. It requires, perhaps most difficult of all, acknowledging that A3 is not the future centerpiece.

And yet, that acknowledgment is liberating. Because once you stop pretending the old engine will regain full speed, you can design a new one without resentment.

The data is whispering in plain sight.

It will be disruptive. Less so for those who chooses to listen.

The End of SaaS - 2027

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:16:00 -0600

The End of SaaS, or Just the Quiet Demotion?

In October 2025, I wrote that SaaS was ending.

That line raised eyebrows. It still does. Yet the product roadmaps and the earnings calls are starting to rhyme.

The claim was never that spreadsheets, forecasts, proposals, invoices, or CRM records disappear. The deliverables stay. The engine shifts.

Agents as the Unit of Work

Satya Nadella said in 2023, “The next generation of SaaS is agents.”

Read that carefully. The agent becomes the unit of execution. The application becomes storage, permissions, and transaction rails.

Klarna provided a field example in February 2024. Its OpenAI-powered assistant handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month, roughly two-thirds of customer service chats. Klarna stated this equated to the work of 700 full-time agents. The company reported a 25 percent reduction in repeat inquiries, resolution time dropping from 11 minutes to under 2 minutes, and an estimated $40 million profit improvement for 2024 tied to the shift.

No one mentioned how much they loved the interface. They talked about repeat rates, minutes, and margin.

That is not a UI story. That is an output story.

Microsoft’s 2024 annual report stated that employees at nearly 60 percent of the Fortune 500 use Copilot to complete tasks faster, run meetings, and automate processes. Source: Microsoft 2024 Annual Report.

Word and Excel did not vanish. They moved into the background. The worker starts with intent and receives a draft, a table, a summary. The file format remains. The cognitive lift migrates upward.

GitHub research with Accenture reported developers using Copilot completed coding tasks faster, and productivity gains were emphasized as a central outcome.

In April 2025, TechCrunch reported Nadella saying that 20 to 30 percent of code inside Microsoft repositories was “written by software.”

The percentage will fluctuate. The pattern is clear. The IDE remains open. The agent produces a growing share of the code.

What the Market Is Pricing

This is not only product chatter. It shows up in valuation.

Bessemer Venture Partners’ Cloud 100 Benchmarks Report 2025 reported average Cloud 100 revenue multiples falling for the third consecutive year to 20x in 2025, down from 23x in 2024 and 26x in 2023, and down 41 percent from the 2021 peak. The same report noted Ai companies trading at higher multiples than non-Ai peers.

SaaStr, citing Clouded Judgement analysis, reported aggregate quarterly net new ARR across the cloud software universe dropped to $1.65 billion in Q1 2025 from $2.33 billion in Q1 2024, a 29 percent year-over-year decline.

Multiples compress. Net new ARR slows. Ai-native firms price at premiums.

That is not sentiment. That is repricing.

In early February 2026, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu described the SaaS industry as ripe for consolidation and noted that Ai accelerates the pressure already present.

Founders tend to speak plainly when margins tighten.

From Interface to Orchestration

Look at the traditional stack.

A CRM is largely a compliance engine. Data entry, stage tracking, managerial reporting. When an agent can transcribe calls, summarize them, update records, and draft follow-ups, the CRM becomes a datastore and permission layer.

An ERP is a ledger with constraints. When an agent reconciles transactions, flags anomalies, drafts explanations, and routes approvals, the ERP persists as infrastructure. The human interface recedes.

Email is a transport layer. When an agent drafts, summarizes, and schedules, the inbox becomes an archive of actions already taken.

This is how applications get “replaced.” Not through uninstalling. Through invisibility.

When the worker stops thinking, “Open Excel,” and starts thinking, “Show me the analysis,” the spreadsheet shifts from operating system to rendering surface.

Relevance beats interface.

Billing Models Under Pressure

Seat licenses assume people log in and operate software.

Agent-driven models assume work can be completed without constant human navigation.

Over a single weekend, one major LLM provider released 11 modular capability updates. The technical details matter less than the billing implications. Modular capability erodes the logic of charging per seat for monolithic access.

In 2024 and 2025, major accounting and consulting firms, including KPMG, publicly discussed productivity gains from generative Ai in audit and advisory workflows. When hours compress, procurement notices. Billing models adjust.

Google reported pressure on core search growth in 2024 as generative Ai summaries began changing user behavior. Enterprise surveys also showed mixed Copilot adoption, which suggests embedding Ai inside legacy products does not automatically restore pricing power.

The pressure is structural. If report preparation time falls, reconciliation hours fall, and support staffing shifts, pricing models built around human effort encounter friction.

Labor compresses. Subscription justification compresses.

The Gregorian Axiom

For the last three years, I have said:

It is not Ai inside your calculator, CRM, email client, operating system, or browser.

It is your calculator, CRM, email client, operating system, and browser inside your Ai.

That line is not poetic. It is architectural.

We will not start with Windows, rows and columns, margins and fonts. We will not begin in Gmail or a CRM tab. The interaction begins with intent. The system returns the deliverable.

Inventory report. Projection. Cost analysis. Board-ready memo. Drafted and routed.

Ask. Receive.

The infrastructure does not disappear. Databases, ledgers, compliance engines, and communication rails remain necessary. What changes is which layer captures margin and mindshare.

SaaS does not vanish overnight. It is economically demoted.

When users no longer live inside a branded interface, the subscription resembles a conduit rather than a command center.

In this cycle, orchestration owns leverage. Interfaces become interchangeable.

The market is already adjusting to that math.

Source: TechCrunch, April 29, 2025.

Source: BVP Cloud 100 Benchmarks Report 2025.

Source: GitHub research reporting, May 2024.

Source: SaaStr, 2025.

Source: Microsoft remarks, 2023.

Source: Business Today, February 4, 2026; Economic Times, February 2026.

Source: Klarna press release, February 27, 2024.

Source: public earnings disclosures and enterprise surveys, 2024 to 2025.

Still Haven’t Found What We’re Looking For in Ai Work

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 4 Feb 2026 12:19:00 -0600

For the last two years, Ai has promised something just out of reach.

Smarter tools. Faster work. Real leverage.

And yet, for a lot of people, the feeling is still the same. You use Ai every day. You get some wins. You save some time. But the breakthrough never quite arrives. You keep scrolling releases. You keep tweaking prompts. You keep waiting for the moment it all clicks.

That tension is the point of this piece.

December 2025 quietly changed what Ai can do. Models stopped being short-attention conversationalists and started behaving like workers who can hold a job for hours or days. Orchestration patterns went from academic to practical. Costs dropped enough that persistence stopped feeling reckless.

The tools crossed a line.

Most workflows did not.

We are still treating systems built for delegation like they are search engines. We ask questions when we should be assigning work. We hover when we should be reviewing. We optimize phrasing when the real problem is task design.

That gap has a name. The overhang.

It is the space between what Ai is capable of right now and what humans are willing to restructure in their day to absorb it. It explains why some teams feel like they are sprinting while others wonder what all the noise is about. Same tools. Different posture.

This article is not about future models. It is about present behavior. About why the payoff feels elusive, and why it will not stay that way for long.

Sometimes the thing you are looking for is not another upgrade.

It is a different way of working.

Read the full piece if that line lands.

Ask Us Anything January 2026: Weather, Robots, Copiers, and Why Purpose Keeps Coming Up

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:56:00 -0600

Ask Us Anything January 2026

Weather, Robots, Copiers, and Why Purpose Keeps Coming Up

Late January gave us a familiar setup. Half the country freezing, the other half sweating, iguanas falling out of trees in Florida, and someone somewhere slipping on ice in Dallas. That was the warm-up.

From there, the conversation did what Ask Us Anything does best. It wandered. But not randomly. It kept circling the same gravity well: Ai is no longer theoretical, and the ripple effects are already hitting industries people still think are “stable.”

Autonomous driving is quietly rewriting insurance

One of the early sparks was Tesla and Lemonade offering dramatically cheaper insurance for vehicles running Full Self Driving. The logic is simple and uncomfortable: robotic drivers get into fewer accidents than humans.

That immediately raises second-order questions. If machines drive better than people, what happens to traffic enforcement, municipal revenue, liability, and the entire ecosystem built around human error? You can ticket a person. A robot does not care.

The conversation never landed on answers, but the direction was clear. The economic assumptions underneath transportation are shifting faster than policy.

EVs, China, and the cold weather test

BYD came up, as it often does lately. Chinese electric vehicles are improving at a pace that has legacy automakers openly worried. At the same time, cold weather performance remains a real-world constraint. Batteries do not care about ambition.

That led to a blunt litmus test: show a battery-powered snowplow working all night at O’Hare in January, and then we can talk. Until then, electrification has limits that marketing slides tend to ignore.

Xerox, Ricoh, and the long unwind of print

The FMF copier news segment landed hard this week.

Xerox received a strong sell rating, with continued revenue decline, rising debt, and another capital raise just to maintain liquidity. This was not framed as a one-off stumble. It was treated as a case study in what happens when a company built on volume faces structural demand collapse.

Ricoh, meanwhile, is stretching toward cybersecurity and digital services. The question raised was not whether they can offer these services, but whether the market will ever see them as credible in that role.

The quiet takeaway: most hardware-first companies are running out of time to redefine themselves, and not all transformations stick.

Scanning is having a strange second life

One of the more grounded insights came from scanning and document capture. Print volumes are flat or declining, but scan volumes are rising.

Why? Because businesses are waking up to where their valuable data actually lives. Not in SaaS dashboards or social feeds, but in file cabinets, legacy paper, microfilm, and forgotten archives.

If companies want Ai that reflects their business, they need their own data. And for many organizations, that data still starts with a scanner.

Dealers who understand what customers are scanning, where it goes, and how it feeds downstream systems are sitting on opportunities they have ignored for years.

MSPs, agents, and the quiet automation wave

ConnectWise acquiring an Ai firm kicked off a bigger discussion about managed service providers. If work can be done remotely, it can almost certainly be automated. And if it can be automated, Ai agents will do it cheaper and faster.

That does not mean MSPs disappear overnight. It means the low-hanging fruit is going away. Ticket triage, routine fixes, basic monitoring, all of it is heading toward autonomous systems.

The uncomfortable question surfaced quickly: if a small business can buy these tools directly, what happens to the middle layer?

From service manuals to perception

A recurring theme was that future systems may not need massive historical documentation to function. Vision, perception, and pattern recognition are becoming more important than static archives.

If an Ai can see a copier smoking and understand that smoke is bad, it does not need to read a service manual to escalate the issue. That same logic scales far beyond copiers.

The implication is subtle but profound. Systems trained on patterns may rely less on stored history and more on live, real-time inputs. Data still matters, but differently than we have assumed for decades.

Purpose keeps sneaking into the conversation

Somewhere between robot dogs picking up trash and Ai-generated video, the discussion turned philosophical. Not in an abstract way, but in a very practical one.

If Ai removes a lot of routine work, what are people actually for?

The answer was not productivity. It was not efficiency. It was purpose. What someone would choose to do if the tools removed the friction.

That question kept resurfacing. In sales. In service. In creative work. Even in neighborhood cleanup. The technology discussion kept circling back to a human one.

The quiet throughline

Nothing discussed felt like science fiction anymore. Robot assistants, voice systems indistinguishable from humans, agents making decisions before people notice a problem, all of it feels close.

The show did not end with predictions or declarations. It ended the way it often does. With curiosity, skepticism, and a reminder that the future shows up first in boring places.

Copiers. Insurance policies. Scanners. Service tickets.

That is usually where the signal hides.

The Demo Is the Deal: Why Copier Sales Can Be Won on Camera, Not on Paper

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:24:00 -0600

“The Moment It Clicks”

For decades, the copier demo followed a familiar ritual. Schedule the truck. Clear half a day. Roll a machine into an office that was never designed to be a showroom. Hope the network cooperates. Hope nothing breaks on the way back out.

That ritual is still treated as proof of commitment in some dealerships. In reality, it has become one of the least efficient, most fragile parts of the sales process.

What has quietly changed is not the copier. It is the buyer.

Decision-makers no longer need to be impressed by effort. They want clarity. They want to see how work actually gets done, how documents move, how people interact with the device, and where time disappears during an average day. Paper descriptions do not answer those questions. Neither does a machine sweating under fluorescent lights in a crowded copy room.

The most important moment in a copier sale has always been the demo. What is different now is where that moment happens.

Virtual demonstrations strip away the noise. No bad lighting. No borrowed network. No apologizing for the room. Just a controlled environment where real jobs are run, workflows are shown end to end, and questions are answered in real time. When done well, the demo stops being a formality and becomes the decision.

This is where many dealers are exposed. Not every rep can translate features into outcomes under pressure. Virtual demos reward preparation, narrative control, and understanding of the customer’s work.

The dealers who adapt will shorten cycles and sharpen conversations. The rest will keep shipping brochures and wondering why price suddenly became the issue.

Read Art's take, Go here

The “Death of the Copier” Still Has a Service Department

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:07:00 -0600

“Copier sales” sounds like a hardware job until the first device goes sideways in the middle of a workday. Then it becomes a time-and-trouble job, measured in minutes, callbacks, and how quickly someone shows up with the right part.

That shift is why I keep circling back to service.

The device can be leased, bundled, swapped, refreshed, managed, or quietly replaced by a fleet of smaller printers and a pile of scanned PDFs. The customer’s expectation stays stubbornly old-fashioned: when they hit Print, something comes out.

In a recent piece for The Imaging Channel, I wrote it plainly: most dealers think they sell machines. They do not. They sell time. When a device has problems, time gets chewed up, and service becomes the business end of the relationship. (The Imaging Channel)

The department everyone references and few people learn

Inside most dealerships, the service department is treated like a separate country with its own language and weather patterns. Dispatch, techs, parts, tickets, meter reads, notes, a service manager putting out fires. That mix is not background noise. It is the operating system of the dealership. (The Imaging Channel)

Sales can be charming. Service is remembered.

Customers don’t typically know the name of the rep who sold the device three years ago. They often know the tech by first name. That can be good. It can also mean the tech is visiting too often. (The Imaging Channel)

New reps: the fastest way to stop sounding new

Most onboarding focuses on product lines, pricing, and how to build a proposal. The part that ages a rep quickly is understanding what happens after the paperwork leaves the sales desk.

In the article, I laid out a simple, old-school learning loop:

Sit with dispatch and listen to how priorities get set
Spend time on the dock and watch receiving and shipping
Watch bench setup with attention to connectivity and configuration
Do ride-alongs and pay attention to the questions customers ask when sales is not in the room

None of that requires a formal program. It requires permission, awareness, and the ability to stand there quietly without turning the shop into a classroom.

One small detail that tends to separate the grown-ups from the tourists is the “service facts” page per account. Device location, contacts, access notes, network notes, paper type, recurring issues. It makes a rep look psychic. It’s actually organization.

Dealer decision makers: the friction is real, and it has a source

There’s also a part most people acknowledge with a grin and then ignore: friction between sales and service is as old as the first service ticket. In the piece, I call out the stigma directly, the belief that sales will say anything to get the deal and disappear, while service inherits the cleanup.

That dynamic shows up most clearly at three points:

Site surveys that are thin, skipped, or guessed
Delivery and installs where the handoff is sloppy
Expectations around response time vs resolution time (The Imaging Channel)

Those are not philosophical issues. They’re operational issues. They land on dispatch, on the tech route, and on the service manager’s desk.

The favor is coming. It always does.

At some point a rep asks for a favor. A rushed part delivery. A squeezed-in visit. Help getting a device up a floor with a forklift and a prayer.

In the article I put it in more colorful terms, because the business has its own mythology. The god of copiers “demands it.” (The Imaging Channel)

The practical point is simpler: relationships built before the problem show up differently than relationships built during the problem.

The full article

If you want the detailed breakdown of roles, language, and the “learn it without getting in the way” schedule, the full piece is here: New to Copier Sales: What Is This Thing Called a “Service Department”? (The Imaging Channel)

For new reps, it’s a map of the building you’re already standing in.

For dealer leaders, it’s a reminder that the service department is not an appendix. It’s the part of the business customers actually meet.