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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

> Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature

We don't need an AMA, we already know the answer. Money.

The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.

Once you look at it in this way, there's nothing confusing about user hostile features. They exist to further the primary purpose of the company, to make money. That's all there is to it, there's no mystery. It's sad and hard to accept, but it's not hard to understand.

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I'd argue there's still some interesting math going on there.

PC hardware is still very much an industry of "I'll ask the enthusiast kid down the street what to buy"-- the sort of business where souring a small number of power users can blow back with a lot of lost mainstream consumer sales.

Do they assume that the "enthusiast kid down the street" is already a lost cause and figure he's never even going to buy a HP printer, let alone express his dismay about it to all his friends?

> PC hardware is still very much an industry of "I'll ask the enthusiast kid down the street what to buy"

I don't think that applies to HP, and suspect that most of their customer base are big businesses who prefer business type reasons for their purchasing decisions

I’d wager that 10x more printer decisions are advised by “whoever is wearing a Staples shirt that day” than by an “enthusiast kid I know”.

Regular people don’t want to research a printer; they want printed pages. If that means buying a $100+ OEM cartridge every so often, that’s what it costs and they don’t think much more about it.

Taking this point even further … at the point which user hostility starts to affect their brand in a way that costs money, they’ll stop doing it and be heralded for listening to their users.

At one point, this whole idea made me furious but now it just feels like the water around us. Unfortunate, to say the least.

> The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.

And what is astounding is that we, as a society, have accepted this backwards rationale.

The only reason we should allow companies to exist is to serve the societal interests, and making the money should be the side effect.

So are you going to be the one that's going to open and run a printer company at a loss for the "societal good", or are you just expecting others to take on that burden?

Who said anything about a loss? We allow corporations to make a profit as motivation to actually do things, but if the things they are doing are not in the best interests of society then we should dismantle them.

The phrasing of your statement is quite illustrative of the problem, I think. We have had it drilled into our heads that society should serve the corporation, which exists only for profit, and that this is natural and good.

Which is bullshit. Society is what permits an entity like a corporation to exist in the first place, and we do it because it is (theoretically) in our interest to do so. When it ceases to serve this function it has become a cancer and should be excised from society, but since it is such an effective cancer it has convinced us that we exist for it and not the other way around.

"Dismantle" "excise" - funny words for unemploying thousands of people because you don't like their approach to selling printer ink.

I think we should "excise" cancers that are callous about sweeping societal and economic effects based on their personal whims.

> "Dismantle" "excise" - funny words for unemploying thousands of people because you don't like their approach to selling printer ink.

We put people in prison because we don't like them selling drugs. If that makes sense, so does this.

Besides, those people can (theoretically) get other jobs. And if we're really worried about it, then 'excise' in this case can just mean nationalizing the company.

To say that we should continue to employ people to make the world worse for the sake of economy is just the broken window fallacy.

> The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.

The thing is, this didn't used to be the case. This is a relatively recent occurrence, and absolutely not the natural order of things.

Once upon a time (yes, this is very long ago), charters were granted to corporations for specific purposes, and if you didn't propose a useful company, you wouldn't be allowed to incorporate.

Sure, there have always been people with skewed incentives and decision making processes, but on the whole, until the past few decades, the basic idea of a company was always "create a product or provide a service; if you do it well, you will profit."

In more recent time, as you say, for far too many, that has turned around into "make as much money as possible; creating a product or providing a service is a necessary evil to that end, and we must trim it to the bone to extract every last cent of profit."

This obviously is antithetical to a healthy, functioning society and economy. It incentivizes all sorts of ultimately destructive behaviors, far beyond the stuff described in the article.

The thing is you'd expect companies should also compete to remove such anti-features in order to claim market share from competitors. It's strange how rare that is.

People don't care. They talk about caring, but when push comes to shove 90% of consumers will buy whatever is cheapest at that moment. If your $200 printer that will let you use whatever ink and whatever cartridge you want is competing with a $189 HP printer that will lock you in to its nonsense, HP is going to eat your lunch all day every day.

Because the simple fact of the matter is that if people did care, what you're describing is exactly what would happen. HP (or someone else) would do something like this, a competitor would start buying ads talking about their open source ink cartridges and HP would start losing market share.

It's not like it isn't talked about on general TV.

In the UK here I remember it being a question on the panel quiz show QI, about being the most expensive liquid on earth.

People don't even have a simple way to find out. How are you supposed to get reliable information on what printers block third-party ink? How are you even supposed to know that blocking third-party ink is a thing?

BTW whenever these "how are you supposed to" things are pointed out, people are quick to say "just use ..." with several conflicting recommendations, which actually doesn't counter but support the point that finding out isn't easy.

Shopping for the optimal product is nearly impossible today with fake reviews, swapped product listings, silent part swaps without model changes, shrink-wrapped EULA-like devil bargins (can't use the dishwasher without installing an app requiring your contact list), etc. Not to mention the number of times a company is actively deceiving users with misleading language (eg I no longer know what TDP means).

I find this is why I am increasingly outsourcing my purchasing decisions to Costco. It may not be the best option, but I typically only have to pick from ~3 models, and it was good enough for them to stock it on the shelves. More skin in the game than just a digital listing.

They do. You can see people recommending Brother printers right here in this thread. I also switched to a Brother black and white laser printer years ago and never had another printing problem. Later I found a Brother color laser printer at an estate sale and used that for years (didn't really need color, but it was a good deal).

I don't know what the actual numbers are, but if I had to guess I'd say Brother has been stealing market share from HP for a while now, because their products are better. It's one of the top comments practically every time there's a thread like this.

And apparently they are now doing a face-heel turn and joining the lockout party. Hopefully mine lasts forever, even though I keep feeding it eBay toner!

If every company can make a lot more money by screwing over consumers then every company will do it. Sometimes it will always be more profitable to refuse to give consumers what they're asking for than it would be to make a better product that everyone is happy to pay for no matter how much market share it might gain them.

Companies exist only for themselves and for making money, and not for serving the people or making the communities they operate in better. They will happily hurt people and destroy the environment to get even just a little bit more wealth.

We grant them the privilege of existing as legal entities though, so maybe we should start demanding they start doing more for us in order to keep or attain that privilege.

Competition forces companies to optimise for the average/majority consumer preferences. The reality is that most of the user hostile features we talk about here on HN - vendor lock-in, non-repairability, monetisation of data, etc - are not important to most consumers, who value low cost and convenience above all else.

The problem is not that consumers don't value the right things, the problem is that they are not always informed enough to make the decisions that back their values. And this lack of information is intentionally achieved by underhanded business tactics, such as selling printers at or below cost but locking them to overpriced ink in order to make them seem low cost while actually having a higher total cost.

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