this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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HP CEO says customers who don't use the company's supplies are "bad investments" (www.techspot.com)
submitted 10 months ago by ChanchoManco@lemm.ee to c/technology@beehaw.org
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From my point of view HP printers are a bad investment.

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[–] beefcat@beehaw.org 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The HP instructions didn’t say that if you connected the cable between the printer and the PC before you had installed the drivers, the printer would not mount as a device. In fact, it would never connect to that PC ever again. Apparently, it ruined the registry until you reformatted and reinstalled the OS.

How do they manage to fuck something up so royally? They clearly knew it was a problem, as they outlined it in their manual. But there's no way it was cheaper to deal with all the angry support calls and lost customer confidence than to just add some code to the driver installer that fixes the registry settings...

If this happened to me, I wouldn't reinstall my operating system, I would tell their support technician to fuck off and go buy a printer from a different company.

[–] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Or even just putting a piece of paper on top of the printer that says, "STOP!! INSTALL THE DRIVERS BEFORE PLUGGING THE PRINTER INTO THE PC"

Surely HP could spend $0.000125 out of their billions of dollars to spare a piece of paper to serve that purpose.

I mean >15% of people will still fuck this up, but at that point, you've done all you can.

[–] beefcat@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Even the leaflet is just a shitty bandaid. What if someone picked up a printer used and it didn't include the leaflet.

It's outright unacceptable to ship a consumer product that so easily bricks itself like this.

[–] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago

That's a good point actually. I agree, the whole thing is just bananas. HP is a zombie tech company at this point though. You know that graphic that illustrates the product life cycle? HP products are somewhere down in the subway station on that graph