13 June 2023
I have been developing and selling Print Distributor for over twenty five years now. It started as a free utility in 1998 which I used as part of my consulting work. After several iterations I released it as a standalone product in 2001 and by 2003 it was providing my sole income. The impetus to create it came from my background in enterprise output management, in particular working with a product called FormScape. The target was customers too small to warrant a consultingware type solution but big enough that they might have the technical ability to install and configure the software. In reality my customers have ranged from small photo printing businesses to large corporations such as Siemens and Hewlett Packard.
It won’t come as a surprise to anybody that print volumes have been falling. This is clearly visible on the sales of office paper. Alongside that there has been a lot of consolidation among printer manufacturers. When I started my career it seemed that every large corporation had a division selling printers. Now there are just a handful left and they are dominated by one company.
For a long time I’ve been swimming against this tide however it was never going to last forever. It has reached the stage where the trickle of incoming orders doesn’t justify the effort to keep the business running so I have decided to discontinue it.
Just to pre-empt some questions you may have:
Existing customer will be able to continue running Print Distributor. It has no requirement to be online or in the cloud and no subscription is required.
I will continue offering support and bug fixes through to June 2024.
If you are an existing customer and need to add more installations then you can use your existing license code for no extra charge.
I don’t intend to offer Print Distributor for free or open source it.
We will not issue licenses for new customers, you will need to seek out an alternative.
I’m sure there will be more questions. I will update this page accordingly.
Tony Edgecombe
Frogmore Computer Services Ltd