Printers have been the same way for ages now (in technology years). There hasn’t been any major updates to the way they work or the facilities they provide. Recently, we have started seeing all-in-ones which can do print, scan, fax, copy and they are wireless. So they can sit in a corner until there is a use for them. You print/scan or copy and you’re done and forget about it until you need to use it again.

Since we have so many MacBook Air clones (UltraBooks) in the market now or coming soon (all were seen in CES 2012), there soon will be an entire class of laptops without any kind of optical drive. And we already have tablets, phones etc which cannot read any thing from optical drive.

So this creates a very good opportunity for companies like HP to add optical drives in printers. Now assume that we have these optical drives which can read/write in any kind of optical media including CD, DVD and BluRay.

Once we have this printer online on our local network in our home, we can use it as a shared drive on the network and any device would be able to make use of it. If say it’s a video DVD, you would be able to stream the content over local wireless network to any device on the same network.

Right now, My XBox, computer, BluRay DVD player all have drives in them. But going forward they can be removed and all of them can use the same shared drive. And we add more devices like tablets, phone on the network that can use the drive. 

The same kind of implementation can be done for USB drives as well. User can plugin a USB drive to the printer and that is shared over the network. Now, depending on the model/price of the printer, it can have more functionalities like streaming etc.

This is a very good oppurtunity here. Let’s see which company thinks of it first and implements it correctly.