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HP CEO says customers who don't use the company's supplies are "bad investments"

https://www.techspot.com/news/101593-hp-ceo-customers-who-dont-use-companies-supplies.html

HP is very insistent that users of its printers don't turn to cheaper third-party alternatives for their ink cartridges. It introduced a feature called Dynamic Security in...

HP CEO says customers who don't use the company's supplies are "bad investments"

From my point of view HP printers are a bad investment.

60 comments

Zellith

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"We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network, so it can create many more problems for customers."

Seems like it's a problem of their own making tbh..

roguetrick

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No kidding. "We've allowed our cartridges to arbitrarily execute code. It's the user's fault."

Zworf

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And the only reason code is even in there is because of their DRM :P

roguetrick

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Hey, we need a robust serial connection to our cartridges for checking ink levels. Nothing more basic would do. /s

Kichae

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"Also, 'check ink levels' by counting how many pages were printed while this cartridge was installed"

tesseract

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And they're investing in the customers in what sense? It's the customers who make the investment in their products and get their dignity challenged in return.

I have a need for a printer and HP is solidly in the don't-touch list. Companies that treat their customers so indignantly as HP should simply be raided and closed for good. Or perhaps, HP should realize that morons like this scumbag are a bad investment as a CEO.

jet

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I'm sure internally they have an internal dollar figure on cost per customer acquired. Such things as marketing, discounts, product availability and different stores, targeted marketing campaigns, B2B sales reps, I.e.identifying corporate customers before they are entrenched with another vendor and actioning on them first.

So in that mental model, each customer acquired has a cost, and the behavior of that customer has a benefit, I suppose what the HP representative is trying to say is the sale on the printer by itself is insufficient to justify the effort and cost of acquiring a customer. They want recurring revenue. Which everybody does

luciole

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Yeah, it’s the "loss leader" strategy. Some HP printers are very cheap, sometimes cheaper than the cartridge you need to put in it. They’re doing it ridiculously aggressively.

floofloof

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I wonder whether they'd sell more if they put the prices up but promised no further charges or restrictions? It would give them a unique market position as a seller of premium trustworthy products. Brother is the closest to that at the moment, though their printers aren't even more expensive. HP is certainly to be avoided.

HobbitFoot

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If you cared about price per sheet and you print a lot, then you'd have a better printer than an ink jet.

HP pulls this shit because that business model works for people who need to print a little.

luciole

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Ink jet cartridges dry up when they’re not used often enough though, which screws people who don’t print much as well. HP just screws everyone equally.

ErilElidor

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I had a printer from HP but rarely had to print anything. It happened way too often, that I had to buy a new cartridge, because the old one dried up. Soo annoying... Now I have a laser printer from brother and it's much better! No more drying up! I guess this is more about technology than it is brand, but it somehow was fitting here😄

HobbitFoot

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I'm talking about the difference between using an ink-jet or something more expensive like a laser printer.

rekabis

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I have a need for a printer and HP is solidly in the don't-touch list.

The only HP printers I still recommend are the vintage ones from the pre-2005 era. HP 4050DTN and HP 5000DTN and the like. Absolutely rock-solid laser printers that don’t have DRM or any other shite. Hell, I can get overstuffed cartridges for the 4050 that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage… who does that these days? And they’re capable of taking JetDirect cards clear up to the gigabit level.

WHARRGARBL

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HP lured me away from Apple about 15 years ago, with promises of better pay and benefits. I made the mistake of believing their lies, and proceeded to work in one of the most hostile environments I’d ever encountered. Aside from the open and constant sexual harassment, I was horrified to see customer service maliciously transfer callers to dead extensions or to the branch in the Philippines, then laugh about it. “Tech support” was for selling more products, not for resolving issues. Management was a shitshow of nepotism, falling-over-drunkenness, corruption, office affairs, and massive cover-ups.

I lasted 8 months, then I fled back to Apple, but I’ll never forget how HP blatantly loathed the customers.

Ganbat

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Their online tech support these days is no better. Just a maze of dead links and broken, 503-ing pages.

thebardingreen

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Aside from the open and constant sexual harassment,

I wonder if they're still getting away with that in 2024...

mp3

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Looks like we're at an impasse; customers don't want to make a bad investment by using HP either.

maynarkh

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Nah, that's a good agreement. Sociopathic CEO tells customers to fuck off, customers tell him to fuck off. They all fuck off in agreement. Customers are happy without HP, I wonder how HP will de without customers.

That said, it seems customers or even profits are not essential to running a public company these days, all you need is investors.

Teknikal

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Hps one of only two companies that will never get a penny from me again. I had an HP desktop that the power supply died on at the beginning of Covid only then did I realise it was propriety and they didn't even have it in stock.

Kept checking for about a year and couldn't get a replacement when every other computer I've ever owned I could have bought a power supply the same damn day.

For the record the other company is Sony who just decided to delete my account with a lot of paid games because I hadn't logged in for about 6 months.

GeekFTW

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Honestly the only thing HP has ever made that I haven't been horribly, horribly disappointed with is their monitors. Just through circumstance of 'whatever-the-fuck-was-cheapest-but-not-total-ass-when-I-went-to-buy-them' I've ended up with 4 different HP monitors over the years, including a 20ish year old 4:3 one which still goes strong to this day.

Every other product was pure unadulterated ass.

Zworf

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Clearly not buying HP was a very good investment for me :)

nyandere

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tl;dr - salty ceo is salty

belated_frog_pants

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Fuck HP, buy a laser from brother or someone else. Anyone else but HP

spider

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rar

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I fucking love my b/w laser printer. No bs, plug and print, nothing else.

danieljoeblack

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I've had the same brother laser printer since uni (shit thats like 10 years ago now) and it's never let me down. The only issue is it stops responding over the network sometimes when I Havnt used it in months.

irongamer

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Laser brother fist bump

jay2

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I built a PC for my little sister in 2007. She was starting college and didn't have a computer. It totaled 2805 and some change, custom built through Antares Digital (When you know, you Lili). These were all top of the line components (Asus M2N32-WS PRO, Amd athlon64 X2 AM2 5200, Corsair Memory). Not a cheapy system in its day.

Three nights before I was to deliver it to her, I completed all of the setup, had all the software ready to go, even setting up a custom theme for her (We were both metalheads). My folks said that she would need a printer/fax/copy/scanner as well, so last minute, I ended up buying an HP 5610 at target for 192 dollars.

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.

To be fair, the manual did say to install the drivers first, then the cable, but this was not the norm back then and they didn't really emphasize it in any way, nor did it mention that you were about to be FITA big time. Had to scramble to completely reformat the drive, reinstall all the software... Essentially, starting over from a blank slate and getting done in 2 days for delivery to her dorm on move in day. It did connect second time around.

I wrote them an angry letter regarding the poor deployment, but of course I never heard back from them. Never bought another HP for myself or anyone else ever again. I go out of my way to encourage people to not buy anything from HP. If I happen to be somewhere and see someone looking at an HP printer, I'll just approach them, introduce myself, and tell them my story to discourage them from buying it.

beefcat

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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

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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

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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

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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

odelik

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As somebody that's been working on computer hardware since the early-to-mid 90s, installing the drivers before connecting the printer was the norm. It was actually the norm for most peripherals. Just be glad you didn't have to do manual irq assignment. Hell, that is probabaly the issue, is that the driver installer borked the irq assignment when the device already had a handshake agreement with the hardware.

I digress though, this shouldn't have been the pattern for a modern printer in 2007, when PnP had been standard for several years at that point.

JustARegularNerd

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I still have a early 2000s (I think that's the era anyway) LaserJet 2200dn and it's done nothing of that sort, even on my spare actual Windows XP laptop. Insanity that their more consumer brand printers had those problems by '07

jarfil

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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.

Don't take this as a defense of HP... but it's a known behavior of Windows where once it associates a device with some driver, like the default ones which didn't work for that printer, it won't try to search for new drivers again... until the device is removed from the system.

There are several ways of doing that, this is a modern writeup:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3322513/how-to-reduce-windows-driver-bloat-remove-outdated-drivers.html

Back in the day, there were several different ways:

Go into Device Admin, click on show hidden devices, and remove the wrongly detected printer.
Use... I don't recall the name right now, but there is a tiny tool that allows you to remove unused devices, handily sorted by "last used" date.
Use any of several tools that allow you doing the same, including some PowerShell commands.

You didn't need to reinstall.

XEAL

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This CEO has defended HP’s actions by stating the need to protect intellectual property and highlighting potential issues and security risks associated with non-HP cartridges.

Go fucking jump in a pit of lava, Lores.

Zworf

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They keep hiring CEOs like this. Fiorina was no better. The board clearly wants the company to function this way.

Whayle

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I've been a customer for decades, including large format, and my newish HP is waiting to be recycled. It's print quality wasn't great, and the HP ink I bought that worked well for months stopped working due to what must be a chip error. Who has time for that nonsense? I won't even sell it, I don't want to push the misery on someone else.

meepmeep

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Buying anything HP is a bad investment

thebardingreen

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I've had really good experiences with their cheaper laptops in general. I tend to immediately blast Windows off them and replace it with Linux and I generally end up with a solid, reliable little work station with a 3-4 year life span, for an affordable price.

lightnsfw

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This has been known for at least a decade at this point. How HP still has a printer business I'll never understand.

meepmeep

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Sadly there are a lot of people out there who buy things without doing any research whatsoever, and will just buy the cheapest printer that suits their needs

fxr0d

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From my point of view HP printers are a bad investment.

This.

(A happy brother user, who regularly refills ink instead of buying new cartridges)

Ganbat

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HP anything is a bad investment. I bought a HP gaming computer because it was on clearance for less than it's graphics card alone, and learned that they lock the bios down to the simplest, most useless options.

petrescatraian

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@ChanchoManco seems fair. It's just wasted customer money for HP.

peter

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They should make their stuff more competitive then

scrubbles

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Obligatory I bought my brother 2 years ago and I'm still in the original toner. A bit more up front but you'll save sooooo much more in the long run.

zhunk

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I got mine a little over 4 years ago and am still on the original toner. It gives low toner warnings but just keeps on printing.

GrayBackgroundMusic

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I thought this was commonly known, but I keep seeing it all over the place. All CEOs think like this. Customer acquisition is a metric all sales departments use. Is it because he's saying the quiet part out loud?

intensely_human

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It’s not even “the quiet part”. Like, it’s completely legit for a business to think in terms of business. Investment is, indeed, what businesses are doing.

1984

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Yeah I'm not buying HP again. I had brother before and it was flawless. Now I went for HP because they had good reviews. Probably payed for those since the printer sucks ass.

reksas

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this makes me want to learn how to jailbreak hp printers and modify one to be able to accept ink from jerrycan via gardenhose or something.

emerald

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The worst part about HP is that I already have one of their printers but don't use it enough to justify replacing it 😔