It is kind of an interesting idea, from the prospective of information fusion. Unfortunately I spend the majority of my development time doing software integration, to achieve the whole synergy thing - for thinking outside of the box with icons in cornflower blue. These systems are generally rdbms backed, but politics and interesting interpretation of security standards often gets in the way. So most of the work is happening further up the stack, where automation is more difficult and common data formats are more rare. Except... PostScript [0] and PCL [1] (guess who owns that). This shortcuts the whole authorization problem, if you can print the data then you are probably authorized to use it. It shortcuts departmental kingdom building, and everybody already ignores security when it comes to printers... Lots of interesting possibilities. Of course then you'd have a Rube Goldberg machine of data format conversion, so I guess my job is safe for now - but I'm curious to see how HP would address that.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_Command_Language

That happens when HP wants to salvage a technology. I remember a few years ago they talked about putting webOS on printers, for example.

They sold webOS to LG, nowadays LG SmartTVs are powered by webOS. Today we have also ChromeOS and FirefoxOS which have a similar role.

I still recall being impressed by the Enyo demo, especially when they resized the browser window and the layout would adapt on the fly.

This could have allowed what Google etc is only talking about, plugging a phone into a larger display and getting a more desktop like UI.

It does seem like a rather odd line. A scanner that could do this might be useful -- a printer doing it would be kind of nutty.

For larger business, probably. For smaller businesses, the printer and scanner is very often an all in one unit these days, and a NAS is one more device we have to maintain, and one of the most frequent activities is to scan documents and save them in a document store, or pick documents and print them. If you can stuff enough capacity in the printer/scanner to make it the NAS too, cheaply enough, and add capabilities to e.g. have it print files directly, then that could be quite useful. A lot of printers already can print directly from memory cards etc., so why not straight from the file server?

In my experience, in larger companies, the printer, the scanner, and the photocopier are a single unit.

I think that, nowadays, you only need custom printers if you have fairly extreme printing needs (large or heavy paper, high-quality color, or large quantities)

And the typical large copier already stores lots of things on disk (http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.98.html#subj13)

What about this is made better by memristor processors?

...until someone takes the printer offline to fix it, and all of a sudden no one can access files on the NAS...

Makes me realize, AiO printers are the smartphone of the enterprise. Everything goes through them. New features accumulation on them wouldn't be surprising. Until everything becomes virtual paper with integrated sensors and powerful enough CPUs.

I'm really guessing they mean one of those big all-in-one office machines, and not a deskjet, but who knows really.

"some people are working on the Machine with an eye to putting the technology into printers. That way, even a simple business printer could contain and analyze all of a corporation’s documents."

Analyze them to send information to whom? NSA? FinCen? Hedge fund managers? I want to see the EULA on that thing.

that quote sounds like a joke

I bet the NSA is asking for it!