Well, not really, but Vyomesh Joshi, the senior vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard’s printing division, has expressed some concern of a potential shift in consumers printing habits.

First some quick facts.

• The printing division brought in 30% of HP’s $91.7 billion revenue last year.
• Half of the printers sold in the world have the HP logo on them.

Now, back to the story. It turns out that the concern was spawned by Mr. Joshi’s college age daughter. She reported to him that college students find printing annoying and unnecessary. Most of what they would print are web pages, and they are simply not formatted to print on a standard 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper. She told her father, “I don’t need a printer.” —- Ouch!

Studies show that half of the printing done in homes is from Internet related materials (email, web pages). Printing from software (like Microsoft Word) only accounts for 20% of home printing. So, if the next generation of printer buyers is finding printing Internet related materials (web pages) to hard you can see Mr. Joshi’s reason for concern.

Blogs, MySpace pages, lists from comparison shopping sites, and map directions for Google or Yahoo! are simply not formatted in a manner that can be neatly printed. Printouts are often don’t appear as you see them on the screen. Images are misplaced or chopped in half and large white spaces often appear on the page.

What to do? Well, HP has taken one small step. Last month they bought a small software company named Tabblo. Tabblo specializes in creating web based software that creates templates to reorganize the photos and text blocks on a Web page to fit standard sizes of paper.