[mrweasel]

What I find extremely annoying is that no one is charge saw this coming. How stupid do you need to be to release an online-only subscription laser printer?

Somewhere in the HP hierarchy reality is removed. I feel like at least one of the lower level people saw this coming. Somewhere in the management layers this became a good idea, an idea completely removed from reality.

The only logic that makes sense is that you have a segment of users that doesn't need to print much, so rather than doing a large upfront purchase, they basically rent a printer, but where is the break even for HP, where is the break even for the customer? When you cancel your subscription does the printer then go back to HP for refurbishment so that another customer can rent it? I doubt it, it becomes e-waste.

The article even says: "To provide our customers with an exceptional printing experience in all office environments, we will no longer offer LaserJet series products with HP+. " So the HP+ didn't provide exceptional printing experiences? I could understand the reasoning that "Some customers purchased an HP product that would not work in their environment, so we're now more clearly communicating the limitations of HP+", but no, they are cancelling it entirely, so it's not about those office environments where always online didn't work. This is an entirely predictably failure of a product, except HP management wasn't smart enough to realise it, because they f-ing priorities are not their customers.

[impendia]

> What I find extremely annoying is that no one is charge saw this coming.

I remember when US airlines started charging for checked baggage. Many more people started carrying on their bags, resulting in slower boarding and deplaning, and therefore problems for the airlines.

I read an interview with an executive at one of the airlines, saying that he didn't see this coming and was taken totally by surprise.

I am bewildered at how these people rise to positions of authority without even the most basic ability to predict obvious consumer behavior.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> I am bewildered at how these people rise to positions of authority without even the most basic ability to predict obvious consumer behavior.

Me too. It seems to be some kind of selective blindness as they'll happily pay advertising money in an effort to influence consumers and then not realise that consumers are influenced by product changes too.

[darby_nine]

I truly believe that to most people the "market" is just a magic force that operates in unknowable ways that magically resolve problems and make you happier (if you're rich).

[loloquwowndueo]

What’s amazing is that these days they always offer to gate-check bags for free to avoid fights for overhead bin space. So which is it, is checking luggage free or not?

All airlines suck!

[raydev]

They actually did predict the most important and obvious consumer behavior, because the airlines are making more money depsite the delays for passengers boarding/deplaning.

[blantonl]

There is no way that behavioral psychologists aren't on staff at all of the major US airlines. Everything in the airlines is a massive study in consumer and employee psychology - from cockpit resource management between captains and first officers to how people board an airplane, to how they queue up in the terminals.

You know damn well what happened - it was well known what was going to happen but the bean counters drowned it out and won out by enshittifying the process and "generating revenue"

[Larrikin]

Bean counter to me always meant accountants looking through data to squeeze out an extra one or two cents by slightly making their product worse. Like Papa John's over the past twenty years using a slightly worse cheese, pepperoni, etc and iterating over that until the product is unrecognizable.

Forcing a massive change all at once to shock the market, gain short term profit, and then change jobs to wreck a different company or industry deserves a different word.

[heliodor]

It could just mean he never tried to analyze it.

[eskibars]

I worked at HP when they introduced Instant Ink. This was a natural progression.

But even in 2013, there were managers in power positions that knew and were talking about how much the subscription models were going to hurt their base. But at the same time market dynamics being as they are, everyone also felt the only way to demand multiples for the stock price was to be seen as a software subscription company instead of a hardware company. Otherwise the revenue multiples on the stock were going to go down.

The stock market reaction leads the consumer market reaction, so executives at public companies are generally incentivized to "sell" a vision that sounds good even to investors even if they believe it will long-term hurt the business. That is, unless the executives plan to stay around a long time (another decade+). Modern companies don't reward that long term tenure so that's dissolved and now all these huge public companies have a slew of upper managers that expect to leave before the fires really take hold and make a pretty penny in the process

[pulse7]

This "demand multiples for the stock price" will kill the United States economy - one company at a time: HP, Boeing, and others are going in this direction...

[Havoc]

> no one is charge saw this coming

They just don’t care. Corporate tactics 101 - push limits until someone screams bloody murder.

It’s the big corporate equivalent of move fast and Break things that is so beloved of SV

[lukan]

Not just corporate tactics.

"We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back. "

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Juncker

It is just rare, that a EU president says stuff like this loud in the open. Otherwise it is politics 101.

[account42]

And that Mr. Junker dares to say this in the open shows the root of the issue - politicians are no longer afraid of their constituents just as corporations are no longer afraid of their customers. They know that even if they do something almost universally disliked at worst they have to back off a bit and lay low for a while. Real consequences are practically unheard of.

[pocketarc]

> “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

Honestly this page is a treasure trove of honest quotes, dang.

[YurgenJurgensen]

There's a secondary result from this strategy: If you only listen when people scream bloody murder, you train everyone to freak out over every little thing because it's the only way they have any evidence that their views are being taken into account.

[raydev]

Exactly, they knew there would be some amount of backlash, they just didn't think it would impact their bottom line through bad PR. Plenty of companies pull off consumer-hostile decisions all the time with minimal fuss.

[donw]

True. Also government tactics 101.

Difference being that HP won’t shoot me for buying a printer from Brother.

[hx833001]

The less charitable name for this is called sociopathy

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

<< What I find extremely annoying is that no one is charge saw this coming. How stupid do you need to be to release an online-only subscription laser printer?

The assumption is the executives are not attuned to what is happening on the ground. While I would like to believe in a level of naivety, lack of knowledge, or even incompetence, years of living on this earth made me somewhat cynical and I no longer trust that. I personally see it as a way to break the customer resistance. Few companies want to be the first one to do it, but once its done successfully, they all jump on the bandwagon.

I would like to give you the example of games. Games used to be offline, they didn't have excessive telemetry, required internet connection, DLCs, day zero patches or pre-purchases. All those things were slowly, but consistently implemented ( and briefly scaled back if there was a pushback ).

I personally believe the same appears to be the case with printers. Execs are not unaware of reality. They are simply trying to create a new one.

edit: changed question to example

[michaelt]

> What I find extremely annoying is that no one is charge saw this coming. How stupid do you need to be to release an online-only subscription laser printer?

Believe it or not, a lot of large organisations opt into systems like this. A cloud-based print queue lets you tie printing to your single-sign-on system, bill each print to the right department, and simplify sending the print to the right printer.

If you can have a third party deal with all the routine maintenance and toner orders and whatnot, so you just get billed $0.10 per page with everything taken care of, that's one less thing to worry about.

With that said, I can well believe this specific HP product would be a deceptively marketed, overpriced, locked down piece of shit. Inkjet printers have been that way for decades, after all.

[ryukoposting]

I think HP is unique among the shitty printer makers.

First off, their printing, copying, and scanning products used to be outstanding. They made some of the only devices that just worked, straight out of the box, with no hassle. They were so good that other companies adopted their proprietary tech as a quasi-standard. Remember hearing the phrase "HP ScanJet compatible?"

Second, they're just about the very worst among major brands today. These e-series printers were heinous enough to get discontinued, but their other products are hardly any better. My Envy was a doorstop until I installed an app on my phone, created an HP account, and paired to the damn thing over bluetooth. It won't print black-and-white unless there's a color cartridge installed. It constantly just stops printing, and I have to go unplug it and plug it back in, wait an hour, and try printing again. I can't be alone in these frustrations.

HP had to fall further than anyone else to reach where they are today.

[mrweasel]

> Believe it or not, a lot of large organisations opt into systems like this.

The way you describe it, I can see that being a viable product. To some extend this could be HP so focused on a very niche segment, like Microsoft with Recall, that HP+ actually seems like a sensible idea. They then forget about the fact that this is just a small segment of they customer base, but they don't really communicate with the rest, so they just roll out this product to everyone and it fails.

However, HP isn't keeping this around, they are discontinuing the product line all together, and from the article it seems like they also forgot about the needs of those large organisations (can't assume that the printers are allowed online, for good reason).

It does seems like it could be a reasonable, but probably less profitable business, if it had been better designed and targeted.

[zrobotics]

The odd thing is that this business model is super old in the industry, going back before computers were common in offices. That is how a ton of copiers were supplied, either sold with a service contract or just rented. That continued for a long time, even for small offices this was fairly common until in the 2010s when laser printers got ridiculously cheap.

However, I'm not aware of these services being offered directly from the manufacturer, it seemed to be via local office supply houses that were dealers for the manufacturers. That being said, this service was probably available direct from the manufacturers for large organizations.

ETA: One thing I didn't mention that I feel is the main reason the service contract model went away is that printers are cheap enough it doesn't make tons of sense to service vs replace. We still have a service contract with guaranteed fix/replacement times for our specialized zebra printers at work. Still makes sense on a 3k+ printer that you can't buy locally off the shelf.

[rowanG077]

I don't think it's that simple. I would never have expected micro transactions to take of. For the same reason that you mention. People really can't be that stupid right? Paying multiple times for a product and being willingly milked for their money? And yet this practice is totally normal now. Look at the horse armor memes from the elder scroll oblivion days.

What this says to me more then anything that it makes total sense for companies to squeeze their consumers to an extreme degree. They might just accept it.

[pantalaimon]

I wonder why nobody yet had the idea to offer an ad-based alternative to the paid subscription.

Just print a few pages of ads before every print job.

[YurgenJurgensen]

You're not thinking with enough buzzwords: The printer has AI and it inserts the ads into your prints.

[bityard]

> How stupid do you need to be to release an online-only subscription laser printer?

Well, CAD software, smart TVs, and electric cars all get away with doing the same thing somehow.

[anal_reactor]

> What I find extremely annoying is that no one is charge saw this coming. How stupid do you need to be to release an online-only subscription laser printer?

How is it possible that Putin wasn't aware of the state of Russian army on the eve of the invasion? Is it possible that all generals constantly lied to him because he killed everyone who disagreed with him and surrounded himself with yes-men, creating an alternative reality for himself? Still, being an ex-KGB agent, and maneuvering through all the quirks of Russian politics, he should be perfectly aware of how the system works. Yet, he sent to Ukraine tanks without fuel nor ammunition. How come?

The more I read about the shortcomings of totalitarian states the more I understand why corporations work the way they do.

[account42]

Has this had any actual real negative consequences for Putin though?

[anal_reactor]

We'll never get insight into Putin's mind and any explanation why he decided to launch an invasion. Depending on his motives and goals, you can say he got a slap on a wrist, or that he gambled all and lost all.

[fullspectrumdev]

> Somewhere in the HP hierarchy reality is removed.

This has been the case for well over a decade at least by now, unfortunately :(

[Pesthuf]

Customers have been getting used to subscription only for many other things that definitely shouldn't be services. Why not try? If you're soulless and generating value for the shareholders is your only purpose in life, doing this makes sense.