I saw this on printceoblog.com
I think it pretty well describes todays print business.
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"Gordon Pritchard, Kodak’s Value in Print marketing manager offers an analogy to explain some of the printing industry’s idiosyncrasies to newly hired Kodak engineers:
“So, what is print manufacturing all about? Well, imagine the printer as a lumber mill- a very special lumber mill. This is a lumber mill that doesn’t govern what logs are acceptable for processing. Imagine that the logs were sometimes solicited by sales people and at other times by artists and other creative types. You’d receive anything vaguely shaped like a tree - dead wood, rotten wood, green twisted wood, phone poles, and non-wood poles painted to look like trees. Before you were allowed to process the “logs” you would have to win a competitive bid based on your ability to deliver the finished wood products. And you’ll submit your bid without actually knowing what your customer understands by the term “finished wood products” or which of the possible variations on a log you will be receiving. To help communicate with your customer, you would use a “proof” - a simulation of the finished wood product that you will deliver. Of course, the proof simulation of your products actually uses another lumber mill’s equipment, but at least it consumes the “log” that your customer has supplied to you. Unless, that is, the customer-supplied log breaks the equipment and doesn’t actually get processed. In which case you either return the log to the customer to be rendered more log-like, or you take on the task yourself without actually being able to charge for the log transformation service.
