Despite companies’ efforts to cut costs and be more environmentally friendly — and a higher environmental awareness in general — most folks are reluctant to change their behavior, at least when it comes to printing at work.

That’s the upshot of a recent survey of 1,000 UK office employees conducted by Kyocera and consultancy firm Loudhouse.

In the past 12 months, 40% of workers haven’t changed the amount of paper they print, according to the survey. Just 22% have reduced their paper use, and 37% are actually printing more now than they were a year ago.

The average employee prints a whopping 45 sheets a day, or about 10,000 a year. Of those, the report estimates 6,800 could be considered unnecessary, including 2,100 extra pages that get printed because employees don’t use double-sided printing.

One reason employees haven’t taken steps to curb that waste: a lack of a formal policy from their employers. Just under half (46%) of employers have “loose guidelines related to printing,” compared to just 24% that have a formal written policy.

Printer giant Lexmark has filed a patent infringement suit claiming 24 cartridge manufacturers stole its intellectual property.

The companies in the suit haven’t been announced, but the complaint is assumed to be connected to Chinese companies that sell Lexmark-compatible ink and toner, Network World reports. The company is seeking damages, as well as limitations placed on the unnamed importers.

Observers say filing the lawsuit is a risky move for Lexmark, because it brings to attention the pricing strategy used by printer manufacturers — sell printers for cheap, but turn huge profits on consumables sales.

Lexmark had already lost a similar case in 2003, when it sued a company for cloning the control chip embedded in toner cartridges that allows the machine to authenticate the cartridge.

That price, which surprised some analysts, bears witness to the importance of internet security in the larger computer world. What most observers believe is that Intel plans to embed many security features into its industry-leading processors, making them even more of market dominator.

In the short term, Intel already serves McAfee’s customers (PC makers) and there may be some antitrust issues as it is in a position to oust McAfee rivals like Symantec from the PC market. But while Intel dominates desktop and notebook computing, it contends with a lot of competition in the burgeoning handheld market (phones, PDAs, and tablets).

Here, the real advantage for Intel may be in the cloud, according to a New York Times article.

For mobile devices, the security features, whether hardware or software, tend not to reside so much in the device as in the cloud services, the severs and storage that connect the devices to the real world. And, as the Times article points out, “those data-center ‘clouds’ are running mostly industry-standard servers, powered by Intel processors. So there may be plenty of runway for Intel to execute its security-baked-into-hardware strategy on computer servers.”

The resignation of HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd, had nothing to do with the profitability of the business. As the Wall Street Journal noted: “To put bluntly, Hurd approved payments for reasons having nothing to do with creating value for shareholders.”

No, it was an alleged bribery and sexual harassment scandal that tripped him up: If you want the details, check here. Or here.

But the sudden switch in leadership has some HP rivals looking for an opening, especially those in the enterprise data management business (such as IBM and Oracle).

For any company in a competitive market, suddenly losing a successful CEO has got to be a blow. In addition, the Hurd dismissal has led to a serious drop in HP stock and a shareholder lawsuit.

Getting a good leader in a fast-changing business is always a gamble, so the next moves HP’s board will be critical. None of this will affect anything in the short term, but HP’s long-term health and the balance of power in the computer and printing industries are on the line.

As we reported last month, overall sales of copiers, printers and MFPs have risen more than 8% compared to last year’s numbers.

Now, Xerox has recently announced its second quarter profits jumped 62% as earnings rose 48%, compared to last quarter.

That performance beat experts’ predictions, AOL’s Daily Finance reports.

Said Xerox chairman and CEO Ursula Burns: “Through the first half of the year, we’ve made excellent progress in scaling our services business and strengthening our leadership in the marketplace. We expect this progress will continue, positioning us well to increase our earnings expectations for the full year.”

The point of the move is to minimize the need of merchants to hold card data.

A ComputerWorld article explains the current problem:

“Many must do so because credit card issuing banks and the merchant’s own financial institutions require the full 16-digit primary account number (PAN) in order to resolve refunds, charge backs and other customer disputes. In some cases, large retailers also voluntarily store PAN data, either because they need it internally or because of legacy systems.”

The new Visa initiative will push the companies (mostly banks) that issue Visa cards not to require merchants to hold the full card data. The company has come up with a scheme that will use proxy numbers (so-called “tokens”) in order to be available to resolve any later disputes.

The move is a response to complaints from the NRF (National Retailer Federation). which has been fighting against the necessity of holding and securing full card data, a major problem especially for smaller merchants.

Eduardo Perez, head of global payment system security for Visa, stated: “By reducing the amount of vulnerable data in merchant systems that must be protected from compromise, merchants can see greater security as well as more streamlined compliance needs.”

Amazon and IBM were declared the top players in the cloud and labeled “cloud champions” in a recent report by IT consulting firm BTC Logic.

Vendors were ranked based on seven broad categories: cloud foundations, infrastructure, network services, platforms, applications, security and management.

After Amazon and IBM, the report placed several other companies, including Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and VMWare, into the next group labeled “cloud heavyweights.”

AT&T, Aylus Networks, Rackspace and SAP’s Business Objects division were listed as “cloud contenders.”

To read the full report, click here.

The GSA (General Services Administration), the agency that takes care of the day-to-day office needs of other government agencies, has finally gotten on the warpath about dealing with federal office printing expenses, which total well over a billion dollars per year.

According to an article in the Federal Times, the GSA has targeted initial savings of $300 million over the next few years. This being the government, they are moving slowly: They aren’t getting into the program until 2011.

The biggest part of the strategy is what GSA calls “strategic sourcing.” The idea is simple enough — to consolidate buying within an agency and between agencies in order to use the purchasing muscle of the government to get better deals for machines and consumables, negotiated by professionals.

This all sounds pretty obvious, but even corporations that pride themselves on cost cutting often lack strategic buying plans for printing in place. The GSA plans to negotiate on total cost of ownership rather than the cost of hardware alone, as has been the custom in many government departments.

Meanwhile, the GSA is conducting an audit of current printing assets — with an emphasis on reducing the number of personal printers on user desktops. The aim is to move to fewer, more economical printers, with more modest energy consumption and a common set of consumables, in order to simplify inventory.

Finally, the agency is setting up training to reinforce such issues as duplex printing, printing drafts of color documents in black-and-white and other paper- and consumables-saving tricks.

The GSA has already rationalized other areas of related office expenses, using its strategic sourcing program on purchases of cell phones, office supplies and delivery services, while saving the government hundreds of millions of dollars already.

These are steps that any company should be taking.

Curiously, the kickoff event featured two outside “entrepreneurs” as spokespeople: Ivanka Trump (whose main qualification is her dad, for whose business she works) and Bill Rancic (unknown to me, but apparently once a winner on the Apprentice reality show hosted by Ivanka’s dad). And their expertise on the subject of cost-cutting on printing is…?

The point here is that an HP laser MFP more than pays for itself in consumables, paper and energy savings. But compared to what? Well, the obvious conclusion is that it’s cheaper to print (and copy and fax) on a laser machine than it is to do so on an ink jet machine — including much of HP’s own product line. You also get additional savings through improved energy management (a real plus in current HP models) and duplex printing, which saves on paper costs — but that’s commonly available even on cheap ink jet MFPs.

The $2,500 figure: Where did that come from? Even if we assume that the difference between printing on a cheap ink jet is four times as much as on a high-end Laser MFP (really stretching it, in our opinion) and that you print nothing but color pages (at around 5 cents on HP’s lowest-cost-per-page laser MFP versus up to 20 cents on a few cheap ink jets), we are talking about over 15,000 color pages a year on a single machine to approach the $2,500 mark in savings.

Is anyone idiotic enough to print that many pages on low-cost ink jet MFPs, which normally have duty cycles of under 1,000 pages a month? Are we to believe that these $79 – $129 devices are working night and day cranking out marketing materials, with harried users endlessly swapping ink cartridges, which often have a capacity of under 1,000 pages apiece?

While we think that HP’s color laser MFPs are very good (especially the higher-end ones) and certainly preferable to ink jets for serious business work, we don’t understand what this campaign is about. Are there really major businesses so lame-brained as to be unaware of the cost advantages of just about any laser printer or MFP over its ink jet equivalent? Isn’t HP admitting also that its ink jet division is charging too much for ink cartridges? And while HP LaserJet MFPs offer better operating costs that ink jets, do they want potential buyers to start noticing that there are competitors that offer even better costs per page than HP in the laser area?

The campaign, which will be supported by point-of-sale literature and through gripping ROI stories on social media, will soon spread worldwide.

Our advice: Kill the few ink jets still remaining in your office, look closely at costs per page of all machines whether made by HP or others and replace where you can have an advantage. Finally, make an effort to print fewer pages — and print in color only when really needed. After all, most printers and MFPs print many pages that never get read.

The presentation, including a section titled “Why is printer ink so expensive?”, was given by Thom Brown, HP’s marketing manager.

His key point was that ink technology is expensive to develop, ComputerWorld reports. According to Brown, HP spends $1 billion per year on ink research and development.

That, he says, leads to ink that’s better and gets more mileage than other options, such as refill kits and ink from competitors like Kodak, who tout their comparatively lower ink prices.

Customers don’t seem to be buying it, though. Most of the readers who commented on the ComputerWorld story bashed HP (and other manufacturers) for their ink pricing schemes.

What do you think?