4 ms·
I wonder how much these problems are problems of information. The reason printers are crap is that most people buy them based on 1) price, and 2) listed featur
by lliiffee 17y ago
I wonder how much these problems are problems of information. The reason printers are crap is that most people buy them based on 1) price, and 2) listed features. As a result, manufacturers optimize for these. If people understood that most of the listed features would never work, the paper would constantly jam, the drivers would never be updated, toner/ink would be expensive, installing the printer would require adding lots of stupid software to windows, they would probably pick a more expensive printer with less features that actually works.
- ShabbyDoo 17y agoI have a HP 4100 laser printer at home for just the reasons you mentioned. Unlike consumer-oriented printers, it's marketed to IT managers who have to internalize all the pain associated with such purchases. These buyers ask the right questions. I'd love to see hardware manufacturers offer SLAs on driver availability. "Support for all MSFT non-EOL publicly available OSes through 12/2013" or something similar. The actual quality of the drivers would be much harder to quantify. The information asymmetry problem is really hard to solve for the "it just works" meta-feature. Could someone build a site that features it-just-works products in various categories? How could one crowd-source this information? When I tell people to buy a five year-old printer off eBay because it's the most reliable thing out there, they think I'm nuts.
- tonystubblebine 17y agoHere's a site of product reviews that have a focus on quality and no emphasis on newness, i.e. things that just work. http://kk.org/cooltools/ http://kk.org/cooltools/