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I'm a fan of Clayton Christensen and have read a few of his books on business market disruption -- including The Innovator's Dilemma which focuses on the hard drive industry in the last 30 years or so. When he writes a piece on disruption, it's generally a very good piece and more often than not, what he talks about comes true in some form.

When Christensen talked about the rise of RIM a few years ago, it made sense -- make a portable email device that performs one function, and performs it very well. Since then, RIM's BlackBerry phones have taken the market by storm and competitors like the Palm Treo and Windows Mobile units took years to catch up. In other words, quality wins over quantity -- we all don't need Swiss army knife-type portable computers with us at all times -- but many of us need mobile access to email at almost all times. RIM knows that I am sure.

So, with Kodak's new plan to lower the prices of consumer inkjet printer ink to tolerable levels ($10 to $20 per cartridge), will the printing and imaging divisions of larger competitors like HP get hurt as a result? HP, Lexmark and others sell consumer inkjet printers at cost (or even at a loss) in order to make the margin up on inkjet cartridges with incredibly huge markups (not really new news.)

If Kodak is to compete on the price level of consumer inkjet printers and undercut the profit centers of the competitors with cut-rate pricing on ink cartridges, could this disrupt the marketplace for consumer printers and their prices? Sure it could, although it's too early to see if Kodak's strategy will work. If it does and Kodak implements this strategy long-term, look for competitors to either follow suit or raise consumer-level printer hardware prices to compensate.

Is Kodak going to hurt HP's profits? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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