4 ms·
If I were king for a day I would simply ban printer makers from selling ink/toner/cartridges. This would fix practically all of the perverse incentives currentl
by hlandau 5y ago
If I were king for a day I would simply ban printer makers from selling ink/toner/cartridges. This would fix practically all of the perverse incentives currently plaguing the printer industry. For that matter I'd also ban cellular carriers from selling phones.
- marcodiego 5y agoA law standardizing cartridges would fix the problem. Of course, with a patent-free royalty-free open standard.
- hlandau 5y agoPretty much. The only problem with this is you'd prevent genuine innovation in print technology, but a requirement that all printers use some open standard (even a novel one published by the manufacturer) would fix the problem well. The universal availability of third party cartridges shows that if you build it, they will come. ...Actually if you don't publish a standard, they figure out how to build it anyway, yet here we are. So as far as I can tell that's not the issue. Though it would at least stop vendors from haunting people with scaremongering about third party cartridges. Clearly there are enough people buying ink from the vendors to make the subsidy model viable. Maybe more standardisation would at least shift this attitude and make more people (e.g. organizational purchasers) see it as a genuine choice as to who to buy from.
- marcodiego 5y agoIn Brazil, HP sued a third party manufacturer for selling compatible cartridges: http://g1.globo.com/tecnologia/noticia/2012/05/hp-resolve-disputa-de-infracao-de-patente-com-multilaser.html http://g1.globo.com/tecnologia/noticia/2012/05/hp-resolve-di... People would probably think twice when buying a car if you could only fill it with gas from stations allowed by the carmaker.