HP CEO says customers are a "bad investment" unless they buy company's DRM ink cartridges

Got a Brother B&W Laser printer years ago and have never regretted it once.

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I think it’s fair to say that HP’s recent leadership history is…not exactly…a brain trust for the ages; even by gimlet-eyed money man standards.

Fiorina was a debacle; Hurd was an ethically compromised slash-and-burn enthusiast(and probably still best of the lot); Leo Apotheker more or less screamed “hold my beer!” then paid eleventy-billion dollars for Autonomy in one of the M&A decisions of all time. Then Whitman took over and got the prestigious Bloomberg “Most Underacheiving CEO” award for her work. One doesn’t hear much about Weisler or Lores; which is probably a compliment given the context.

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I just bought a handful of DVDs/BR discs over the weekend at our local record shop. They have a HUGE selection of movies.

I kinda stopped paying after Carly shredded the culture, and the company, to pieces. I knew people working there in the late 90s, and at the same time people working at DEC who suddenly became HPers. They all saw the writing on the wall. That was the time of HP’s steep negative slope they never recovered from.

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“Every time a customer sucker buys a printer, it’s an investment for us we got the sucker by the fucking short-hairs. We are investing in conned that customer rube, and if that rube customer doesn’t print enough or use the little money-maker that we conned him into buying and buy our over-priced shit, it’s a bad investment failed con-job.”

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Yup. They used to be my go-to for not just printers. Now they’re dead to me since quite a while.

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(looks wistfully at the 42s calculator emulator on his phone): Yep. Sigh.

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Please. 48GX.

Is this missing the word “worst”, or is this like “one of the top 100% of all web sites” awards? (for once I’m not being pedantic, I didn’t pay any attention to Autonomy or Leo, so honestly it could be the worst M&A ever and I wouldn’t know…or it could just be “his greatest achievement was a random purchase where he didn’t get too ripped off” & I wound’t know which! – also back when I had a personal web site I had a top100% award on it, and occasionally got people complaining to me that I can’t award that to myself! How do I really know I’m in the top 100%! Prove it!)

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Someone recently told me DVDs were done, forget it, everyone streams now, etc. (This same guy told me years ago that vinyl was dead-- and he works in the record industry, now he’s hustling to find enough factories to keep up with the LP releases.)

I think DVDs may have a long post-mortem afterlife, same as vinyl. I too find lots of cool DVDs for $1. IFC and Criterion films, classic noir, and recently I’ve come up these cheapo box sets where they cram 11 films onto 3 discs, all forgotten B-movie sci-fi-- so 11 films for a dollar. “The kids” will start collecting this stuff like they did with thrift store vinyl.

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That one was always outside my budget. So was the backpack needed to carry it… :slight_smile:

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Yes.

It did not go well. HP overpaid, or (as they claim) were conned by Autonomy, who had inflated their sales bookings. (Due diligence? Go figure.)
The ex-CEO of Autonomy has been extradited from UK to US to face a fraud trial over this, so HP may have some justification, but I repeat: due diligence?

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Alternatives to HP?

Brother, absolutely yes. Competent tech support (but you won’t realize that because the product just works and you don’t have to call); reasonably-priced printers; reasonably-priced consumables. My Brother MFC is a workhorse and is well worth the money I paid for it.

But Epson has gone the way of HP. They will disable your printer. Fuck them AND HP.

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Due diligence is for losers.
– Elon Musk

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Looks like one company had a whoops condition on their device communications.

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Amen. My old, simple Brother has outlasted a couple multi-function printers and remains a solid, reliable workhorse.

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I think smart devices would not exist if they had to pay the owner for their data usage. You’re in my house, if you want to phone home, then you’re going to have to cough up. Call it an accessibility investment.

But they’re doing it for your benefit! Honestly!

(Another late-stage capitalist lie.)

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not that is relevant, but in the end, the dishwasher was not transmitting 3.6GB of data daily, was an issue in how ASUS reported the traffic.

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So Leo is Elon’s role model?

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But who will be Elon’s Whitman?
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1T62EP/