I’m in Chicago for the NPES 2007 Industry Summit, which includes Print Outlook, PRIMIR meetings, and NPES meetings. For those of you who do not work in the printing industry, the purpose of the event is to give printers and suppliers a good idea of what the future holds.

The messages from the various economists and consultants were somewhat repetitive, which is actually a good thing since people mostly agreed on everything:

• Overall print will grow slightly.
• Most likely going down a bit in business forms, publications, catalogs and newspaper
• Up a bit in direct mail
• Up a big bit in packaging
• Printers who want to survive will need to adapt, offer more services, and show their customers that print is a viable medium, and help them leverage it
• Print really is a viable medium for lots of reasons, and we need to show this

I’ve greatly simplified the above, but that is the gist I got. With the internet and other changes in communication and technology, as you might expect there’s a lot of potential change coming in print. There’s already been a lot of change in print. So NPES decided it would be a really good thing to get this event together to educate printers, as they do from time to time.

The messages weren’t very surprising. I’ve heard them before, and I’ve read them before. There was a lot more detail, and a lot more explanation, and of course a lot more opinion.

What was surprising was the audience. Paper companies. Ink companies. Press manufacturers. Lots of journalists and other consultants. One or two printers. I may exaggerate a little, but others confirmed my suspicion that there just weren’t many printers there. It’s my first time at this event, and others didn’t seem surprised at the mix.

I asked if it was a marketing problem, but the response I got was that printers just don’t want to hear the news being given. Is that the case? Or have they just heard them enough they don’t need to hear them again? I hope it’s the former, but I suspect it’s the latter.

[Updated]

Later I asked some more folks, and someone posed another option. Printers are busy, and many aren’t thinking past “next week Thursday” and thus don’t make it to many events like this. Could very well be. Still, even if my company was 50 people I’d like to think the big guy was planning for the future with the best info available.

One of the things I love about computers is their ability to keep the most trivial details in order. I’m not a detail person by nature, so I’m grateful for technology that fills that gap.

So, when it doesn’t, life really sucks. Apparently, since my company is a hearty drinker of the Microsoft Kool-aid, life is gonna suck between March 11th and April 1 of this year. You see someone decided to change the dates that daylight savings time begin and end on, and it’s making a lot of Microsoft products go a little Kaflooey. Our calendars may show meeting times an hour off. There will be no indication that it’s an hour off, we get to find that out the old fashioned way.

Here is the advice that we got from our IT department:

Since this is the first year for the change, there are a few very important things you need to know about your Outlook Calendar:

• Some of your meetings may appear an hour later during the three weeks between March 11th and April 1st. During those three weeks, you can either meet at the time shown in your calendar or change the meeting time.
• If you plan to change the time, check the resource first. It may already be booked by someone else.
• Only change the meeting time if you organized the meeting. If you were invited to the meeting, do not change anything on your calendar.
• If you make no change to the time of a meeting, all attendees will see the meeting exactly as it shows up on your calendar.
• If you have recurring meetings during those three weeks, the meetings may also appear an hour later. If you decide to reschedule the meeting, be sure to select only the individual occurrences, not the meeting series, when you make changes.
• Confirm all your meetings with external customers or vendors since you don’t know if their e-mail system has adjusted to the new Daylight Saving Time.

At first I wanted to fire off an email to the IT folks asking why a patch (of course, there surely is a patch, right?) wasn’t installed. First I decided to look at the instructions. Jesus. It’s like John Cleese wrote them. There are several different sets of instructions for Exchange Server alone, depending on, among other things, whether users “Make lots of recurring appointments using Outlook Web Access”. No wonder we got the instructions from IT. They’re probably looking at the instructions and thinking they won’t be able to get them done by April 1st.

Does anyone know how the various Linux distributions and apps are fairing with this change? I did a brief search on Ubuntu, but all that came back was stuff for Western Australia. This article leads me to believe that Linux may not fair any better.

Can you imagine if all the crap that people thought was going to happen at the turn of the century, but didn’t, happened instead on March 11th? All because we decided to shift daylight savings by 3 weeks to save a little energy.