Finding my 2012 Prediction in a Japanese Filing Cabinet

The other day, while cleaning out old document cabinets, I found a Japanese trade publication from 2012 with an article based on something I had written back then in English: The MPS to MNS Evolution: Eliminate the Risk and Cost With Network Monitoring Software.

That was a strange little time-travel moment.

First, because finding your own name in a Japanese publication more than a decade later is the kind of thing that makes you stop cleaning immediately and start procrastinating with purpose.

Second, because I had completely forgotten how ambitious the original argument actually was.

Back then, the thesis was that the printer and copier industry should not stop at Managed Print Services. The bigger opportunity was to move beyond fleets of devices and toner contracts into something broader: Managed Network Services. In other words, stop thinking like a print channel with a service add-on and start thinking like a service business that happened to come from print.

At the time, that felt logical. Maybe even inevitable.

Printers were already networked. Devices were becoming smarter. Monitoring tools were improving. The customer relationship was already there. Dealers were sitting inside client environments, seeing infrastructure, workflows, support issues, and all the inefficiencies around them. From that vantage point, the next step seemed obvious: if you already manage the print environment, why not manage more of the environment?

So after finding the article, I became curious. Did the industry actually go there? Did the printer and copier world really make the move from MPS into something more like full-blown managed services? Naturally, this turned into research instead of cleaning.

And the answer is: yes, but also not really.

What happened over the next fourteen years is less a dramatic transformation story and more a very industry-specific version of adulthood. The vision was directionally right. The execution was slower, patchier, and much more conservative than the theory suggested.

The strongest players did move beyond pure print. Over time, parts of the office technology channel expanded into managed IT, cybersecurity, cloud services, workflow automation, communications, and related support offerings. Even the language around the industry changed. The larger dealer groups are no longer described as simple copier dealers. They are increasingly framed as broader office technology businesses with print, IT, and service capabilities under one roof.

That sounds like a win for the old thesis, and to some extent it is. But then the numbers arrive and politely ruin any dramatic self-congratulation.

According to The Cannata Report’s 2025 dealer survey, 47% of office technology dealers say they offer managed IT services. That sounds substantial. But those services represented only 7.6% of total dealer revenue in 2024. Which is a very elegant way of saying: plenty of dealers added managed IT to the brochure, but for many of them, print still pays the bills. That is the interesting part.

The industry did not march in formation from MPS to MNS like a beautifully executed strategy deck from 2012. What it did instead was split. The more ambitious, acquisitive, and operationally capable firms diversified. Others stayed heavily anchored in print and added adjacent services where it made sense. So the shift happened, but unevenly. It happened more at the top than across the board. It happened more in pockets than as a clean channel-wide reinvention.

In fact, one of the more revealing details is how much acquisitions shaped the story. A lot of the move into broader services was not the result of copier dealers waking up one morning and spontaneously becoming network experts. It was driven by buying capability, merging into larger groups, and gradually assembling more diversified service businesses. Since 2020, 40% of dealer-to-dealer transactions tracked by Keypoint were made by mega dealers. That tells you a lot about where real transformation tends to happen in mature industries: not through inspirational conference panels, but through consolidation.

Meanwhile, Managed Print Services did not disappear, which was another important reality check.

Print remained relevant. In some ways it became more strategic, not less, because security, compliance, hybrid work, cloud print, and workflow integration kept it tied to broader IT decisions.

Quocirca’s recent work makes exactly that point: MPS is evolving and expanding, but it is not being replaced so much as redefined and increasingly converged with adjacent IT services.

So no, the industry did not fully become the thing I imagined in 2012. But it also did not ignore the direction entirely. And frankly, it makes that 2012 thesis look pretty good. I was early, but the channel was slower and more conservative than the theory assumed.

That, in hindsight, is probably the fairest reading.

It is also a reminder that industries rarely transform in the clean narrative arc people like to tell afterward. They drift, hedge, delay, rebrand, acquire, test, retreat, and selectively evolve. The printer and copier world did move beyond pure MPS. It just did so in the way established industries usually do: cautiously, unevenly, and with one eye still firmly on the old revenue model. Which, honestly, makes the whole thing even more entertaining to revisit.

You write something in 2012 thinking you are describing the next logical step. Then fourteen years later you find a Japanese publication in a filing cabinet, look up the old article, and realize the future did show up. It just arrived wearing orthopedic shoes and carrying a managed IT brochure that still smelled faintly of toner.

If nothing else, this was a good reminder not to throw away old papers too quickly. Some of them come back as evidence that your younger self was not entirely wrong. 

   
   
Note: The Japanese article uses マーカス・ブリンザ氏. The name itself is rendered in katakana as マーカス・ブリンザ, and the final character, 氏, is a formal honorific commonly used in Japanese editorial and business writing, roughly equivalent to “Mr.” I mention that here because I liked the detail: the article was not just using a Japanese spelling of my name, but the full formal publication style.