Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html
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Customers, such a bother for a business!
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I bought an HP a few months ago to replace my aging Canon. The thing would NOT connect to wifi. I spent time with tech support, ultimately they blamed me.
Ok, whatever, I’ll just connect by USB. It worked for a couple of days, then REFUSED to print anything until I connected to wifi and ‘signed in’, which of course it would not do.
Back to the store, got a refund, never again. Fuck those guys.
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“Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”
Well, maybe sell your printers for a price that doesn’t leave a hole in your pocket, Enrique?
All the best of luck with finding a replacement. 
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Well, I can see latest Davos has empowered a lot of high-level executives to speak their mind…
Is good that HP has not got my money in ages. I worked briefly at the early 2000’s, in the middle of Fiorina’s gutting of HP corporate culture the founders encouraged and Platt tried to keep alive.
It was absolutely discouraging to see on one veteran engineers talking about the “good old times” and encouraged me to quit ASAP as, paraphrasing them “curious people is not going to thrive here anymore”.
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Does the right to repair include products which are broken according to sales models? (“no.” …oh)
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Maybe the bad investment is HP’s business model? hrm.
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I don’t see any customer reason for the printer to need internet access. (Auto software updates? Ugh.)
I wonder what the printer and the company mothership have to talk about, and how often? (And will it shutdown again if it can’t?)
HP: “Printer, increase ink wastage by 10%. We must make the sacred number go up!“
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Came to say much the same. I’m happy not to be invested in, by paying an economic price for a printer and being free to source my ink wherever I like.
Hey! I have an experiment for you, you fuckwit CEO: put the same printers on sale with two prices.
- at this cheap price the printer won’t print unless you buy over-priced ink from us, and trust us, we CAN and WILL brick it from afar if we detect anyone else’s ink in there
- at this fair price you can use any ink you like and we will remove the ability to brick it.
And then see how many you sell of each.
And as for
if that customer doesn’t print enough
Just fuck you, you miserable slimeball. Do I have to enter a contract now to print a minimum number of pages a month? Good luck with trying to impose the old commercial photocopier terms on people who just need to print the odd letter, now and then.
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One more time: Brother laser printers, Epson EcoTank inkjets
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What seems especially damning about the whole consumables-as-recurring-revenue fiasco is how much worse the ‘consumer’ tier experience is; despite the fact that managed print has long been really, really, common in business settings and (whatever it’s other sins; looking at you MFPs that need a crazy license key just to behave like normal IPP printers; and ‘value added’ resellers who won’t let you touch anything without sending a tech out and billing accordingly…) mostly revolves around an understanding that the vendor generally has a competitive advantage in producing consumables that don’t really suck(in terms of print quality or cleaning transfer rollers every few hundred pages, or both) and that it’s in everyone’s interests for relatively high-quality machines to not need service or replacement all that often, because both are disruptive, and for vendor consumables to be quietly replaced as needed at a price that makes rolling the dice on 3rd parties unattractive.
The ‘consumer’ experience seems to offer all the charm of the classic razor-and-blades; all the reliability of cost-optimizing a printer until it bleeds to get the sticker price down; and doesn’t even handle the process of taking your money for consumables smoothly; despite HP controlling everything involved.
I understand that there’s a certain inherent disagreement about margins between the vendor and the customer; but it’s pretty unimpressive how much of the HP printing experience being terrible comes down to things that should be items of mutual agreement: HP wants you to pay more per page, you want to pay less per page; but nobody gains anything from chaotic downtime; hair-trigger firmware freakouts; general unreliability; excessively short consumable life, and so on.
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The printers are not the product. You are the product.
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I think I am due for a factory recall.
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The real bad investment was the friends they lost along the way
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Probably rethorical question but most updates consist of:
- Updating security keys so you cannot use too old or pirated cartridges
- Closing security holes in the printer internet connection (so hackers cannot hack your printer, but also to prevent decompiling of the software)
- Updating the web-communication software (usually because server changed IPs, or they modified the API so competition cannot simulate calls to validate their cartridges)
Sometimes they also snuck some quality of life upgrades (like reducing booting time or improved error detection) but AFAIK most HP cheap printers use a platform that is 10-15 years old, only changing the control board to make it cheaper and the cartridge format so you cannot reuse old cartridges on your new printer, so there’s not much to improve. And the cheapest ones render the content on the computer side, so is more common to have “improvements we like” by updating our printers than by updating the firmware.
On the commercial printing side (HP plotters, not office laser printers) is (or at least used to be) different, as most of these printers get the lion’s share of hardware improvements and rendering is done printer-side. So on bigger printers you get the above ones, but also fixing bugs in the software (when I was there, i discovered a bug that locked your printer if you sent a specifically malformed file).
Soooo yeah, no wonder is expensive for them. Look at all the effing money they have to spend to keep people locked in their renting plans!
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I’ll never buy an HP product. They’re low-quality, high-price, incredibly high-maintenance, and absolutely bottom of the barrel for value.
I’m pretty sure they only get by any more because of large company contracts instead of individual consumer sales… They’ve become the modern equivalent of IBM back in the 70s - companies will pay a premium because they recognize the name, but they don’t get jack shit for it that they couldn’t get for a fraction of the price from a company that gave a damn about their customers.
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Has Carly stopped running for Senate yet? Please?
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HP missed the memo on the enshittification lifecyle: first you have to get a monopoly, then you can gut your customers and suppliers to maximize profits while your product turns to shit. Thank goodness we still have other options we can go to for printers.
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Friends don’t let friends buy HP* printers.
*Applicable to all the other printer manufacturers who eventually roll out this bullshit.
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