> Unhelpful customer support, making it impossible to troubleshoot problems anyway Sadly this is by explicit intention. I used to work at HP and got involved

> Unhelpful customer support, making it impossible to troubleshoot problems anyway Sadly this is by explicit intention. I used to work at HP and got involved with the printer group because of their policies - they were and probably still are mostly horrible, greedy people with small minds! We were one of the other "B2B" organizations so we routinely talked to customers because 99% of our sales were direct face-to-face (and they still are today since the split). So we were happy to let customers contact us and our web site had that provision. The printer group absolutely did NOT want to ever talk to customers. It was worse than customers being lepers in 1 AD!! Some of the arguments given to us included: * "That's why we have channels - so we don't have to talk to customers" * "It costs us the margin of 14.3 DeskJets to even look at an e-mail from one customer. It's not worth it!" They never asked or cared about how many fewer customer issues might be addressed to avoid attempts to contact with some modest Pareto sorting * They said it was "too hard" to sort and categorize messages that came in (this being the COMPUTER/Printer organizations) and we were only a measurement division. I wrote a text scanning system in about a week to do exactly that (an early NN/ML system) and it would output: Organization, Product Number (most people were really good about including enough information to arrive at that), Product Line, Product Line Manager, Product Line Support Contact. So I used it on our incoming messages and then on the poor souls who couldn't find contact info for printers who contacted us. And it worked just fine. I just got several corporate databases which would key off of product numbers. 99% accurate in summarizing and scanning to that. So next meeting I brought up the issue of "printer customers contacting us", they repeated the same excuses, and handed out that months summary and detailed referable messages for their products. They didn't like that - definitely a f-ck you on my part. I then summarized what that report meant for this business (I don't suffer fools well) which included: CompuUSA failing to uphold their channel contract which required they deliver warrantee services, and a major design flaw in one of the DeskJets that was causing massive failures in the field. They had no clue about any of this! Because they didn't want to talk to customers. Nor even engage their channel partners regularly! I also happened to sit next to the marketing guy in charge of that product: he actually knew before it shipped. His "plan" (because I overheard him brag about it) was to get as much revenue in to get promoted and then it would be his replacement's problem. The very antithesis of the HP Way - fuck him! All of this is why, despite being a long-time customer of and ex-employee of HP, I'd NEVER buy HP printers or computers nor would I even accept them as gifts! Hell NO! There are competing companies out there that actually care about quality and customer value. That is NOT HP Inc. nor HP Ent.