Just for the record, the TouchSmart technology came from Next Window in New Zealand; HP were perhaps just the first major PC manufacturer to incorporate the idea. The publicity for Next Window had the opposite effect to what they were expecting though; they were sued for copyright infringement by a Canadian white board manufacturer, who subsequently bought the company.

Great colour printing 22ppm and it is a networked printer which allows use in my small office.

You can’t blame Louderback on this one; he’d left the company a year before I did. If anything, Jim was highly supportive of ExtremeTech. I think he left because he saw the writing on the wall.

One word: “Offshore”.

The “Offshore Boom” started in the late 90′s, due in large part to the shortage of software engineers in the US brought on by the massive Y2K work that was going on at the time. Once once the suits figured out they could get a SW engineer for $20K instead of $100K, and since most every suit thinks that any sofware engineer is as good as any other software engineer, the flood gates opened and the US jobs evaporated.

It’s not that offshore engineers are any less smart or able than their American counterparts,. Its just that it took us 40 years to figure out the processes required to mangage software development in a way that does not result in crap. It is not unreasonable to expect that it will take them just as long. What’s worse is that the American management Is more clueless about SW development the further away it is, so the goals/schedules/budgets are pretty much what one would expect from Dogbert. The result is that much of what is produced offshore is crap.

I never worked for HP but I have been in Tech for 25 years, and I have managed teams of hundreds both in the US and in India & China (so I guess I am more of the problem than the solution . I would bet a month’s paycheck that the higher margin “business” product lines, like Laserjets, contain software written locally while the “consumer” (i.e. Photosmart) software is all offshored.

As I write this, some VP is getting his or her multi-hundred thousand dollar annual bonus at HP for doing such a good job of “controlling software costs”. Which is great until HP loses their customers. Which is what will happen if they don’t get their act together. Like many other respondents to this post, I will NEVER buy another HP consumer printer. Like a famous character on an even more famous TV show once said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”.

About HP printers: I was a long time Epson fan until a couple of years ago when the incessant head clogging, particularly with little-used printers, drove me to HP. Yes, a 298MB download for what is basically a printer driver is absurd – my Linux install is not much larger than that! The HP software is slow, bloated, hard to install, harder to uninstall, and incompatible with almost everyting including itself. With four printers on my network I actually had to build a script to kill all of the dead processes HP leaves around and reboot the print spooler from time to time because the Laserjet driver locks up the spooler if it runs while a photosmart job is printing.

On the other hand, my hardware experience has been terrific. I believe the Photosmart Vivera inks to be superior to Epson’s (pigmented or dye) in terms of color renditon, particularly on art (uncoated) paper. My cheap Laserjet is blindingly fast considering its cost and compared to any Inkjet.

I have four printers ethernet connected on a “home” network – three Photosmarts (B9180 13″ and two multifunctions) and a P1505n Laserjet. I can leave the B9180 sitting for weeks and when I want to make a large print, it’s right there – no clogs, jams, whatever. It just sits there an maintains itself with no help from me; it even auto corrects the (hardware) color balance using an admittedly basic built in colorimeter. The other Photosmart printers also do not clog – ever. And what can you say about a $172 laser printer that is good for almost 40 pages per minute printing pdfs?

So maybe what they really need to do is just stop offshoring the software development, since that move seems to have coincided with the drastic reduction in software quality (that should get the flames roaring, eh?).

Again, I’m glad to have found your blog.

Mark

I’ve never owned a Canon printer but I’m going to take a look now. Thanks Loyd and all.

Their customer service was abominable – the worst I’ve ever experienced from any company. Countless hours on the phone and never with the same person twice. Finally gave up and returned it. HP is not what it used to be in any facet of its product lineup. I’ll never purchase anything from HP ever again.

I ended up getting an HP because of a good deal.

And my HP C6380 AIO prints decent enough so far. No complaints there.

But yes the HP software sucks and yes the printer sounds like a 15 yr old washing machine in the middle of a fast spin cycle when it feels the need to clean or adjust the printheads before or after printing.

HP printer software reminds me of Creative’s Soundblaster software. And that ain’t a good thing.