What is the most shocking is that HP softwares are usually the crappiest crap that we can give on a computer. So it is really bad to see that forced on so many computers of people that might have avoided it in theory.
Printer software tends to be below average quality bloatware for most popular brands. Don't know why this happens. Back in the days when I used Windows I avoided running setup.exe supplied by the printer vendor and tried to install only necessary drivers using Windows UI to driver update/reinstall.
(User-facing) software made by hardware manufacturers is almost always subpar. And printers are some of the most notoriously user-hostile hardware that exists, so naturally printer software is even worse than hardware-bundled applications in general.
It's outsourced two or three times. Some subsidiary in a cheaper country gets the job, outsources it to some local bodyshop that outsources it further to smaller firms or individual contractors.
Old HP was something special, people here might not be aware that they were a leading test equipment company back then not just a PC maker. That business was spun off as Agilent then spun off again as Keysight.
At a previous job we purchased a 3458a multimeter for some precision measurements. Its use cases are more limited now than in 1989 when it was introduced, but for high precision it's still the standard and the design is practically unchanged. They published a very in depth article on its ADC design at the time.
> Old HP was something special, people here might not be aware that they were a leading test equipment company back then not just a PC maker. That business was spun off as Agilent then spun off again as Keysight.
This sure sounds like a MBA beancounter desease gone cancerous.
Yep, there's a whole YouTube genre of fussing with pre-Fionacide HP test equipment. We have a couple pieces in the lab. The internals are a sight to behold, built with their period's best technology and no costs to spare.
Surely 2D printing is pretty much a solved problem by now. How come there is no company making cheap, no-fuss printers that accept standard USB&network printing driver protocols. You'd expect them to eat everyone's lunch.
Arguably there should even be open source printers by now.
Microwaves are also solved problems that are complete garbage now.
Nobody gets to graduate college and become rich by maintaining a solution, so you get people who make products worse to show an increase in profit to justify their salaries and promotions.
Are they? I just had a look in Asda and 9/10 microwaves just had a start +add time button. Event the big brand ones. I think there was a Samsung one with one of these keypads that look like a 1998 Nokia but those are rare and I have no idea who buys them.
Can you elaborate on what's wrong with them now? My chicken pot pie and frozen burrito still burns me while being frozen inside, just like it did 30 years ago.
Counterintuitively, 2D printers are substantially more complex than 3D printers. Everything inside them needs very tight tolerances and many thousands of custom components. The only companies that have the tooling to make printer-specific parts are printer manufacturers and they sure aren't going to sell you parts so you can directly compete with them.
I have a black-and-white laser Brother printer from over 15 years ago. Never changed the toner, comes out once every few months for the rare occasion I need to print something. I love it
I bought a massive Brother DCP-L8400CDN printer for home use after tangling with some monstrous HP combo printer/scanner that didn't like to scan if the ink wasn't genuine. It's a colour laser with double-sided printing and an ADF scanner that works brilliantly over a network connection. I've been running it for years with 3rd-party toner refills and it "just works", though occasionally I've had to power-cycle it when it was too sleepy and didn't wake from a Windows print job.
The profit is in the ink rather than the printer. There are two issues with someone coming into the market with a cheap printer/ink.
1) It's hard for any business to keep selling a product at 10% profit margin when you know you can sell it for 200% profit margin with the price increase not affecting sales.
2) In the rare situation that a business would accept low margins 'just to be nice to the customer' - they'll just get bought out. It's hard to not accept 10 years of profit for a business when it's being offered to you.
Interesting. With Windows 10, I rarely use the start menu button. One of my boxes had the HP Print software. I did not see it add/remove programs, nor do I have any HP computer equipment. Looks like it wanted permissions when it started up for the first time and had what appears to be a working uninstall. If it shows up on another computer - will track down how they installed it. Not cool.
TL;DR fault is not on HP side but on Windows side.
90% of commenters didn't read the article. (Yes I hate HP too. Use Brother.)
> It's likely that whatever bug is causing the problem made these PCs believe they had an HP printer connected, and then Windows worked the way it's designed to work and downloaded the HP printer app as a result. The questions are: What caused this bug? (..)
Readit News
Even my HP laser is bearable!
At a previous job we purchased a 3458a multimeter for some precision measurements. Its use cases are more limited now than in 1989 when it was introduced, but for high precision it's still the standard and the design is practically unchanged. They published a very in depth article on its ADC design at the time.
https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1989-04.pdf
This sure sounds like a MBA beancounter desease gone cancerous.
But yes that. I have a fair bit of HP test gear lying around dating from 60s to 90s.
And a few RPN calculators!
HP kit was eye-wateringly expensive (and worth it), back then.
Arguably there should even be open source printers by now.
Nobody gets to graduate college and become rich by maintaining a solution, so you get people who make products worse to show an increase in profit to justify their salaries and promotions.
I have a black-and-white laser Brother printer from over 15 years ago. Never changed the toner, comes out once every few months for the rare occasion I need to print something. I love it
1) It's hard for any business to keep selling a product at 10% profit margin when you know you can sell it for 200% profit margin with the price increase not affecting sales.
2) In the rare situation that a business would accept low margins 'just to be nice to the customer' - they'll just get bought out. It's hard to not accept 10 years of profit for a business when it's being offered to you.
This is like reason 9.832 not to use windows.
90% of commenters didn't read the article. (Yes I hate HP too. Use Brother.)
> It's likely that whatever bug is causing the problem made these PCs believe they had an HP printer connected, and then Windows worked the way it's designed to work and downloaded the HP printer app as a result. The questions are: What caused this bug? (..)