Hewlett-Packard is simply an evil company. In Israel, their customer support has been so awful that Israeli customers united and contacted the global management about the quality lack of service. That alone says a lot – Israeli customers rarely unite. Online forums are full with disappointed customers, who could not get their devices fixed for one reason or another. It has come to the point where I simply recommend friends not to buy HP products because there will be no support for them.
Another thing is the well-known high cost of HP Inkjet printer cartridges. The European Parliament even forced HP to remove “smart chips” from their cartridges in order to get their prices lower (link to a 2002 news article). I haven’t bought an HP product in years… I wonder if that actually worked.
Why do I talk about this now? Because an HP former employee just revealed 14 Hewlett-Packard “Company Secrets”, all of them infuriating if you ever had problems with HP customer support. The one that left me with my jaws open wide was this one:
Many HP Printers, like their laser printers, have a built-in page-count after which they won’t work.
Yes, you read it right. Your printer might stop working just because you printed a certain number of pages already. Later on, another 9 more “fun HP facts” like these were published.
There is only one simple conclusion – HP is an evil company. I recommend you to not buy their products and let them rot. (via Digg)
I’m really skeptic about what this former employee says in #1, #2 is trivial for all companies, what is the big secret about the others?
I also disagree regarding the printers support (I don’t know about their other products). It is well known that they, and other companies, make their profit from the ink and not from the printers themselves. Actually the printer price is relatively very cheap, and since printers themselves are a very sensitive product I assume that including support would have increased the price dramatically. I think that here people take for granted that printers should be replaced more often than desktops and just throw them away when they break. I never heard of someone who gave a printer to be fixed. That said, here you can return a product within 30 days even if you used it, so it gives you the option to test it or replace it if it breaks within that time frame.
Do other companies give better support for printers? (I think that you see many complaints about HP because that what most people buy)
As far as I know, ink is only so costly for HP printers. Also, when a company has a large portion of the market, it’s common to regulate its products’ prices (for example, by declaring it a monopoly). I don’t think the EU investigated HP regarding their ink prices for no reason.
And by the way, HP printers come with half-full cartridges, which is another deceitful way to con consumers out of their money. You can read about a man that sued HP and lost here:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20030913-2812.html
Also, by the way, ink costs more than human blood:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/hp-ink-costs-more-than-human-blood-booze-212444.php
I would like to also note that I didn’t only address printers in my post. HP has zero support here in Israel, and now I know why – they don’t care about small markets. It’s a good business decision, but if that’s the case they are welcome to pull all their products out of the Israeli market and never bring them back, for all I care.
For Brother printers it is exactly the same, and the printing quality sucks. Have you ever got a good support for any gadget?