Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 22:08:01 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Jim Freeze" <jim@freeze.org> Cc: "Mike Porter" <mike.porter@xrxgsn.com>, "John Merryweather Cooper" <jmcoopr@webmail.bmi.net>, "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: What is the magical incantation necessary to print to /dev/ulpt0 Message-ID: <000d01c1247f$17662060$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.32.0108131021510.20427-100000@www.stelesys.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Jim Freeze [mailto:jim@freeze.org] >Sent: Monday, August 13, 2001 7:36 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >> >> This is only true for retail consumers that are stupid. Most businesses >> look at reliability first because they understand that saving a few hundred >> bucks in capital expenditures is piss-poor economy if it increases your >> service and maintainence costs by thousands over the life of the printer. > >You are right. Businesses look at reliabilty first. Consumers look at >price first. Lexmark inkjet printers are targeted toward cosumers. I think you ought to rephrase that. There's plenty of businesses that _tried_ going the "buy the cheap printer" route and realized they were wasting money then got real printers instead. There's even a few that are still so boneheaded that they are still screwing with the crap printers. There's also plenty of "home user consumers" out there that are knowledgeable and don't buy the crummy printers. The problem is that the market is really comprised of TWO types of customers - those that really need a printer and those that just _think_ they need a printer, just like they think they need a scanner/joystick/other garbage. The second group runs out and sees color printers at CompUSA for under $100 and thinks "Gee - I could save so much money on greeting cards I ought to get a color inkjet" So they spring for the $89 and get the color printer, take it home and plug it in and for the next two weeks prints out about 20 greeting cards which end up in a drawer. Then the novelty wears off and the printer starts collecting dust. 3 months later they fire it up again to print something and the ink has dried in the cartridge. So they go to the store to buy a new cartridge and find that the replacement ink cartridge costs $60 and think "Gee, I could buy a NEW printer for that" and proceed to do so. Then the old printer goes into the landfill. The process repeats itself indefinitely. >This >may look foolish (stupid as you say) to a business, but nevertheless, it >is a reality. Else why else would lowering the cost per page meet with >lower sales, even if the price is only slightly more. Because the purchasers don't actually need to buy a printer - they are just buying another toy to plug into their _big toy_ their computer. You have to congradulate your marketing people they have figured out how to sell something to somebody that they don't need. > When your competitor >has kept the same price or even lowered their prices, your $.04 saving per >page doesn't translate into more consumer sales. In fact, sometimes it is >cheaper (rebates, sales, etc) to buy a new printer than to buy a new set >of printheads. > Of course - this is intentional. It's sickening but the printer industry today has gotten almost as bad as the soft drink people. Not a single person living needs soft drinks - they make you fat and rot your teeth and wreck your health. But the soft drink people have conned the general public into buying them. Half of the printer manufacturers don't even manufacture their own imaging engines anymore for half of their products - they buy them from Canon or someone like that. 3/4 of the products are pure trash and the remaining 1/4 are fantastic printers - but what's lost is that they have completely screwed the people that need a basic, reliable, and trouble free printer that doesen't cost $5K, make dinner and sing and dance a jig. >(I have sat in many a meeting where adding a single button to increase >usability was debated becase it would add $.05 to the cost of the >printer.) > Printers without front panels don't even deserve a mention IMHO. >> > >It costs money to put hardware in the printer. >> >And when all (well, from marketing's perspective) your customers already >> >have a printer running windows, then why not use the computer and make the >> >printer cheaper. >> >> Because if you push the printer intelligence from the printer into the >> driver, then you decrease reliability because you can have interactions on >> the host between other software and the driver. > >Yes in general, but not really a factor for printers. > Not true. The problem is that the people that buy crap printers and run into problems either aren't smart enough to figure out how to get the thing going and so never do and just shove it into a closet "for the next computer" - or they realise they got snookered and return the printer and get a real one. Then the retailer just checks it over and puts a label on it marked "already opened" and knocks 10% off it and puts it out for the next poor slob to buy. You can go down to Fry's here in town and see lots of these already-been-sold printers sitting right next to the brand new ones in the rack with their little stickers on them. When the manufacturers make the retailer pay for returns shipping and take 3 months to credit back their accounts, the retailers just figure out how to push off the returns back into the consumer channel. Don't kid yourself - the only reason that the returns rates on the so-called "consumer" printers aren't as high as they are is because the marketing groups in the printer manufacturers have structured it so that for the most part, the retailer loses when they return anything. >> >In the all the current Zxx series, the host driver >> >performs all the half-toning and shingling of the data. The printers >> >actually have hardware 'rotater' code that formats the data for the >> >printhead. In the upcoming release, this 'rotation' will be done in the >> >host computer. This saves alot of chip real estate since the new printer >> >has larger more complicated printheads. >> > >> >> This is all great in theory but a nightmare in execution because it just >> encourages hardware companies like HP to rush a hardware design >out the door >> then spend the next YEAR buggering around with the device driver >while all of >> the customers are in effect beta testers. > >Well, I don't think a 3Billion dollar industry is theory. >Some would call this flexibility. Until they buy the next version of Winblows and the printer is no longer supported and the manufacturer has no plans to release a driver for it. Or they upgrade to Windows NT/2K and there is no driver. No wonder the industry is 3 billion. >The businesess customer (as you put it, 'has brains') will but the >consumer will not. That is why lexmark has two divisions, a business >printer and a consumer division. In fact they sell an inkjet for >businesses that supports postscript, but it is the biggest failure I have >ever seen. I think they have sold 100 printers. > Of course they had to have two divisions - because the people selling consumer printers aren't really selling printers - they are selling "computer peripherals" ie: toys for customers that have no need of them. That's of course in between the time that they are hawking expensive "inkjet-only" paper to the same poor consumers. The two groups have fundamentally different business philosophies and goals. With the business group the goal is to sell as expensive a printer as possible and so they throw the kitchen sink into it. With the consumer group the goal is to make the "product" just barely usable enough so that it lasts just barely long enough so that the customer can't get away with returning it back the the retailers - and to make it cheap enough so that the few consumers that figure things out don't figure it's worth their time to load up the product and drive back to the store - and also to setup the consumer to buy the next printer. What disappoints me is that the division that has a goal to sell a solid, usable printer that is cheap to care and feed, has a set of options that can be added on like a NIC card and a duplexer that don't break the bank - this division has been crushed out of existence. So what ends up happening is that the market in this group - people like me - have to go picking through the printer wrecking yards where the old business printers go to die, hoping to run across some beast that hasn't been thrashed within an inch of it's life and sporting a page count higher than the local Lotto jackpot. >> they are removing the most trouble-prone part of the printer - the imaging >> software -from consumer warranty protection. > >The imaging software is not the most trouble-prone part of a printer. > Not trouble-prone I guess but impossible-to-fix. It's easier to replace the broken hardware than to get the manufacturer to acknowledge or fix bugs in the driver. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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