[detaro]

* Few companies are good at hard- and software at the same time.

* Competitive market - pressure on price, in consumer market especially on up-front price. Weirdness around pricing schemes with ink, fight against cheaper alternative ink/refills, now ink subscriptions, ...

* this has generally let to low expectations, and in consumer market getting out of that is difficult. What does a "premium" consumer printer brand look like?!

* Complexity: Quite mechanical in nature compared to e.g. PCs or phones. Some parts need to be very precise (but still cheap). Handling paper is just tricky. Printers have very differing usage patterns - sometimes very high load at once, otherwise stuck in a corner for months or years. This doesn't jive well with cheap.

[hakfoo]

What I don't understand is the need for product churn.

Okay, photo printing at home was a new thing with some tighter tolerances, but a lot of home and office printing is asking for not much more than it was in 1997-- 300-600dpi black and a few coloured charts. Why not just take a bulletproof design from that era and swap out the control board from parallel to USB/Ethernet/Wifi? The R&D and tooling is done, and you can sell the premise of "takes big affordable cartridges with cheap generics available" if you're willing to not get on the Gilette business model train.

[avian]

One role of product churn is to reduce the impact of unbiased reviews and make comparisons with the competition harder. If the model you're buying is only available in your specific region for a month or two it's impossible to know beforehand what kind of lemon you're buying.

My recent example: local consumer association published a comprehensive test of some 250 printer models in July. Out of those I could find 6 models I could actually buy, none of which met my needs.