Readers regularly complain about companies that don’t support their own products. Remembering this, and my own experiences, caused me to unload on an HP product manager during a phone interview the other day. While testing a new HP dc5750 desktop computer running Vista Premium, I wondered why it didn’t automatically support my existing HP PhotoSmart 2610 All In One (printer, scanner, copier, fax). HP computer, HP printer, so connection should be a no brainer. No joy. So I asked the HP product manager why HP doesn’t automatically include all their printer drivers on the hard disks of all new PCs they deliver. After all, shouldn’t an HP printer always work on an HP computer right out of the box? The product manager hemmed and hawed and gave me the normal marketing blather. “Customers don’t want extra CDs in the box, which is why we don’t send a copy of the operating system.” I don’t know who he’s talking to, but I and everyone else I know greatly prefer getting the OS on a CD rather than trusting the hidden partition with the original files installed.
“We don’t want to add lots of unnecessary files to the install package.” More BS (Blather Supreme). As bloated as Windows is lately, especially Vista, who’ll notice a few extra files? On my main PC running Windows XP Professional, the C:windowsinf directory has 1508 files for a total of 58MBs of data. The total number of .INF files in C:windows and all subdirectories adds up to 1294 files for a total of 45.2MBs (there are other driver file types inside the inf directory). Let’s say adding all printer drivers for all of HP’s printers used 200MBs of disk space. Let’s double that, and say 400MBs. But whenever you added an HP printer to an HP computer, the driver would already be installed, so no more searching for the printer CD or downloading driver files. What a great marketing pitch for HP: “Every printer and every computer work together first time, period.” Plug an HP printer into a Dell computer and you need to do the driver dance. Plug that printer into an HP computer, and the printer works immediately. I think that would be a great sales advantage for HP. What do you think?
