And they decided to spin off the excellent bit as an IPO and keep the established quality brand name for the consumer PC part of the company. You could perhaps unkindly describe it as passing off or trading on the name. I still have difficulty in remembering that todays HP *isn't* the one that made my excellent old flatbed scanner or Laserjet.
I preferred TI and still have an SR59 and print cradle in the loft somewhere. RPN was ATIP.
Look at the upfront costs for the printer - they are selling it as a loss leader end expecting to get their money back on the overpriced inks. All makers do it to some extent. HP print heads don't last well because of their relatively high stress boil the ink operating mode.
But surely you accept that the company has to make money by selling its products. Discounting the printer and overpricing the media has been one method that works to open up the market. Colour lasers for instance.
You have to do the sums for total cost of printer ownership *extremely* carefully to find the right printer for your needs. At the moment with some of the deals on offer the Dell 1320N colour laser through the right channels is hard to beat coming with 3 sets of OEM toner for about £170. Depends on throughput whether it is right for you.
I bought a second one to get the OEM toners and a spare chassis & print engine. Book price for 3 sets of toner if you were daft enough to pay full price would be £750 or cheapest aftermarket refilled ones £240.
Its only disadvantage is that it is a big ugly brute. And by pure chance it produces its best photoreal output on HP 120g/m^2 Laser Paper.
HP now target a different end user market which is *very* price competitive. I don't like chipped ink cartridges at all but the manufacturers all do it with different degrees of success. What you seem to be coplaining about is that HP have chipped theit cartridges in a way the the third party ink suppliers have not been able to beat.
The only thing that stops me refilling my laser toner cartridges at the moment is that I cannot buy the toner refills for less than the cost of brand new toner cartridges from my alternative supplier.
They are technical sales selling stuff on repeat business.
I was talking about big salesmen selling high end stuff at $100k and up relatively infrequently to a given site. Some are definitely worse than others but they will all say whatever it takes to close the sale.
There was another scandal reported yesterday of UK high street electrical stores scamming customers buying HDTVs and Blueray players for £100 HDMI interconnect cables "to improve the picture quality".
Never had any problems at all with technical sales guys from chip makers. I sort of miss the old paper applications books though.
You really have to be aware that the salesman's job is to take as much money off you as he can get for as little product. On high end stuff his bonus is in part determined by the margin he gets. That is why stores are so disappointed when you don't buy ripoff extended warrantee.
Who said *anything* about the company. The objective is to make the CEO as rich as possible in the shortest time and then exit at the peak.
That is how the market works these days. I have had a London barrow boy trader from the stock exchange tell me that it is the duty of employees to lie about their company so as to maximise "shareholder value".
I have pretty much described the .com bubble above.
And plenty of companies do. I watched Fisons PLC implode in exactly that way after they completely lost the plot by diversifying into areas like scientific instruments where they were utterly clueless.
The writeup on this site is far too kind to the senior executives:
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The timeline is slightly inaccurate but you can get the gist of it.
General Motors never had a good name - it was at best "barely adequate". Certain UK & US businesses are extremely good at asset stripping.
It isn't valuable enough to stop the sharks from destroying perfectly good businesses to make a quick buck.
Not only do I miss them, but I've tried to get PDF's printed via places like Lulu and Amazon. Problem is, they want to see that I have a right to print them. A specific right, not a bunch of handwaving. I tried to get ahold of TI's attorneys to get such a document and it was like pulling teeth, only a lot worse.
One of these days, there won't be paper books at all anymore. This event, the shifting from paper databooks to PDF only modes of operation, is a microcosm of a larger movement that will likely nearly eliminate paper books as publishers decide to save expense and trouble and end users get used to the idea. Problem then will be, it will be very easy to change them and deny they ever were any different. Especially if the publishers can wireless access to your book readers without your permission. Who knows what history we will be told one decade a certain way and then another decade a different way. Will be interesting times. Not unlike the way the book 1984 suggests, perhaps.
Write-once memory like paper books has its advantages.
Doesn't matter. I worked at Tektronix and for a time very closely with the sales force, since I was writing the programs that paid them their checks and computed their bonuses. I can't tell you how many times I encountered a salesman who'd get their customers to order hardware (their STS systems was a line I saw this done with on a number of occasions) or just lie about the order.
Thing is, their bonuses were on order, not sale. So they'd get paid right away. If cancelled, the idea is that it would come out of some future order's bonus. But there were accelerators in the plans, as well, so getting an order in even if cancelled would push them over useful lines. And quite a few would just "quit" before the order would be cancelled, anyway. Some I saw were $30-40k bonuses that were never paid back when the order was cancelled because the salesman just up and quit before it could be taken out of his hide.
Happened a lot. So much that I had no idea at all why Tek allowed more of it to continue. We all knew what would go on. But the sales management at the top (VP's) didn't do anything I could see, anyway.
People look out for themselves, often, more than they do their employers. If the calculations work out in their favor to make a quick buck and leave, they will do that. If it works out better to keep the job, they will do that, too.
Yes, and...?
Cripes.
I've been personally involved in starting three companies, one of them with a peak of perhaps 60 employees in it. That one secured venture capital, by the way, so I got some early experience with that process there and plenty more later on (2007 was my last, close-up and personal experience with the venture community.)
I can't believe you write that way. I haven't met a single venture capitalist or even heard of another via personal relationships who care the least bit about the long term future of a company. They want to make a killing and soon. Most would prefer no more than two years, but accept three as a reasonable time period. Four if it is a multi-company deal they are pulling together for an IPO. All of them want that IPO and they don't care at all what happens after. The whole damned thing can fall to pieces the day after they sell out and they will be just fine about it. Really.
Funny, but true story. An acquaintance was struggling to find a venture capitalist for a new graphics board he had designed (and not yet built.) Knowing venture capital, I told him they would be asking him if he still had his car and his house (they may not know a technical business area, but they _do_ know that _you_ must truly believe enough in what you say if you've already jumped off a cliff and only _then_ ask for help -- it's good evidence of your convictions.) He still did, so I told him he needed to look more desperate than that. I also gave him some names to call, once he had "invested himself" a bit. He got his startup money and some time later opened up shop near the business I'd cofounded earlier.
I'd stop by, from time to time, just to see how he was doing. Visit 1? Not there. I said I'd come back. Visit 2? Still not there. Same with 3 and 4. On the 4th, I asked his secretary if he was seeing XXXX (the venture capitalist to whom I'd referred him.) She looked totally shocked and asked me, "How do _you_ know that?" I just smiled.
What happens is simple. They give you money. You start business. They want more investors, but at MUCH LESS % for each $, just to help make their own early investments a bit safer (more money for less stock = much good for them.) So they get the one guy who should be spending all his time developing the company for its health working instead on attracting in more investment money for the least possible stock transfers -- which means almost constantly wasting time on stuff the president should NOT be wasting time on.
It's like this. The venture capitalist sees a tiny window in the sky, called an IPO. Your business is a rocket to them, that can reach that tiny window -- maybe. They want you to fuel up and launch. And, hopefully, if all goes right, you might actually direct the rocket (business) well enough to hit that IPO just right (accounting looks good on paper) so that they get maximum return as soon as possible. Once they have bailed out of the rocket, they really don't care if it has any fuel left. It's kind of a one-way ticket, so to speak. It goes up, and where it comes down they don't care.
It's all about getting in and out. Not about long term health.
And that's venture. Executive staff? Can be just as bad, at times. I've seen cases where the president sells off everything they can and simply high-tails it to Florida where the bankruptcy laws make it possible to own something like
100 acres and god-only-knows how many millions of dollars in the house, completely immune against all claims. Florida shields a damned lot of wealth from bankruptcy.
People who look at companies as family and look out for the long term are likely to get eaten before they can reach that old age and collect on that reputation.
Tektronix? They were deathly afraid of leveraged buyouts, back in the early 1980's. I was talking directly with one of the board of directors, Jim Castles, at the time. So I know. They had no short term debt, no long term, were looking out for their employees, etc. Of course, that didn't work once leveraged buyouts became the norm.
Those days are gone thanks to people who only look at the initial purchase price and not TCO.
Why do you think that something that lasts forever is cheaper than something that will only last -lets say- 5 years? I recently replaced my 16 year old HP Laserjet 5. The price of the new printer (HP P2055dn business model) is ten times less than the Laserjet 5. If the new printer lasts longer than 1.6 years it is already cheaper than the Laserjet 5!
--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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And you've anything that Keynes wrote? Your idea of "Keynesian philosophy" is what you have picked up from articles in teh right wing newspapers that you fancy, and the proposition that there is a homogenous "political class" that distorts Keynesian philosophy for its own ends is just one more nutty conspiracy theory. Individual politians are capable of every kind of knavery, but bleating about their activity as a class reflects regretably sloppy thinking.
Got any more irrelevant analogies? Keynesian pump-priming is borrowing and spending, but for a very specific purpose, under very specific conditions. James Arther is too dim - or too politically biased - to be able to distinguish this from regular short-sighted extravagance - but you ought to have more sense.
Which rather misses the point that Keynesian stimulus is a short term reaction to a very specific problem. If you want to complain about your long term balance of payments deficit (since Regan was president) which has built up because you've imported more oil than you can pay for, be my guest, but don't make the mistake of confusing it with some kind of Keynesian stimulus directed at getting your economy out of recession.
Try reading what I wrote - even if you find it tedious it might prevent you from making a total ass of yourself.
" >Even somebody as silly as James Arthur ought to be able to
Very dangerous. Our lot were at least on actual sales made and if they hadn't jumped ship in the meantime they were expected to go and get the last 10% on final acceptance from the customer.
The problem for the company is to make sure that the bonus scheme actually encourages employees to do the right things and do them correctly. I have lost count of the number of times that people were motivated to do things that seriously compromised production by myopic stock control bonuses that were quadratic on minimal end of year stock holding. The whole company would seize up in January as supply lines from other divisions on the same bonus scheme also deadlocked.
I have to speak up for the US venture capital industry here.
We did once meet some very good high tech VCs/business angels who were tied in to well known US high tech companies and my university. I will not name names. Their brief was to find ground breaking new ideas in the UK at the seedcorn stage and give them enough money and management to get off the ground with a view to a later IPO. They had a timescale of 5 years and were prepared to back things no UK banker would touch.
At the time UK's 3i were only interested if you were already big enough.
They are not all quite that bad (or rather weren't in my day).
Yes they wanted an IPO but they were prepared to wait a while and preferred things that either crashed and burned or grew up quickly to businesses that bumbled along without either growing or failing. The admin costs otherwise rapidly end up being dominant.
Unfortunately that is true of the stock market and particularly true of the so called "absolute return investments" aka hedge funds. They will happily destroy other shareholders value if they can make money by doing it (usually by circulating unsubstantiated market rumours).
We don't have anything quite like that in the UK although you do get to keep your primary residence I think. I hope never to find out.
Unfortunately the market is all about short termism these days. Your company is only as good as the bottom line on next quarters accounts. No room for strategic vision any more.
It looks like you need a lecture Bill, a bit of schooling.
Even without more borrowing Obama's Treasury Dept. has ~$200 billion a month in money coming in. SS checks are about $50 billion a month. Debt service is about $30 billion a month. You can get all the current numbers from the Monthly Treasury Statement.
First payment on SS and the debt before any other obligation is required by /law/, and there was plenty of money to pay them.
So, even absent new borrowing, other programs might suffer, but those never could. No matter what else, there was never the slightest chance there wouldn't be "enough in the coffers" (to paraphrase Obama) for SS checks. It was impossible. He had the money, and he's compelled by law to pay those first.
This is where your ignorance disserves you yet again Mr. Sloman. That's why you're so easily gulled by the simplest, most transparent of lies. I s'pose you get it from our media. They're idiots.
Who said cheaper? Who said things can't get better?
Besides, why couldn't there be a HP P2055dn that lasted 5 or 10 years?
They sabotage their ink cartridges. Suppose you found an auto- destruct timer in the new printer, good for 18 months? How is that good for the environment, etc.? They're free to do it of course, and I'm free not to buy it.
The printer I got cost about the same as an ink refill. Rather than that, I'm also free to buy new ink jet after ink jet, and make gadgets with the parts at their loss-leading expense. (Hmm, I kind of like that idea.)
It's better than that--the best possible thing we can do is all go on unemployment and collect food stamps. So reasons Pelosi--she says those pay back in spades.
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ch-over-food-stamps/ "For every dollar a person receives in food stamps, Pelosi said that $1.79 is put back into the economy."
"It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance. The biggest bang for the buck," she said.
I have three HP Laserjet 6Ps, refurbs from ebay. Perfectly reliable, and each cartrige lasts me a year or so. One day, maybe I'll get some refurb color printers.
Actually equipment has become so cheap these days that buying refurbished doesn't make sense. This year I bought a new laptop, new monitors and a new printer. I did look into second hand but for the laptop the difference between a 4 year old one with a dead battery and a brand new one from Dell was ?100. Ditto for the printer and the monitors.
--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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There could be. But at some point in the grand plan for the ultimate consumer society it was decided that things should expire after about
3-5 years and that "good" citizens should be encouraged to upgrade kit every couple of years. It was possible in Japan for western postgrads to pick up on the street two year old hifi, TV and furniture that had nothing at all wrong with it (apart from being >2yo) on big garbage day.
I suspect you can blame someone at Harvard Business School for this...
Exactly. Your choice is limited to buying the product they offer or not. The company's duty is to maximise income for its shareholders or maybe just pump the shares sky high and then allow the cognoscenti to sell out to the sucker day traders like the poor "Rich".
What they are doing is bad for the environment, but it is a direct consequence of the consumer society and the worship short term profits above all else. If you go too far in the other direction you end up with kit that never wears out and the company goes out of business before the customer ever needs a replacement.
I take it that you don't own any CDs or DVDs then?
I agree is is bizarre that the refurbished waste stream that consists of better than as manufactured gear can sometimes include sufficient inducements for the savvy purchaser to buy a second market printer simply to get the OEM consumables that go with it.
I have one of those too--$25 plus probably $40 shipping because it's so heavy. It has the old Canon print engine, which everybody used back then, so you can use all sorts of brands of toner cartridges, too. I put 48 meg of memory in it, but it's pretty slow on bitmapped PDFs though!
Thanks, Phil. I have already __been__ doing duplexed printing for many years -- starting with my HP Laserjet II back so long ago I can't even remember when I bought it, now. I just do NOT like being in the publishing business. I have to make sure that literally hundreds of pages all print properly. Perhaps I haven't spent enough money or been smart enough to buy the perfect printer, but all of the duplexers I've used with any regularity (and could afford to buy) had problems -- at least one or two during a print. Two pages will get stuck together, for example, and I'll have to thumb through the stack and find those and replace them. Or it will jam up and I'll go back and restart it only to find out that some pages are missing because the printer "lost them" in the process, or else the printer overcompensates and reprints multiple pages again. The upshot is that it takes babysitting time. And I do NOT want to be a print shop. I've had enough of it, already. Yeah, I am getting good at it. But I don't WANT to be good at it.
Finally, other stores around here refuse. Those I believed would print these things with fair results in the end.
But if you are talking about UPS, the shipper, I wasn't aware they also printed out documents. So I just called them and confirmed your suggestion. Price is 4 cents per single side page (and 8 cents for double-sided) at 1000 pages, 5 cents at
500-999 pages, 6 cents at 100-499 pages... and they do have some very basic binding capability - the plastic, thin, flat stuff I don't like much. I had been hoping for the bindings I can get through Amazon and Lulu. A 450 page datasheet would cost me over $30 ($27 for the print out and about $5 for the binding that I don't like and another $1 just to start the process.) At Lulu or Amazon, I'd get a much better binding and a much lower price. I could afford to print more.
So it's an option, though not a really good one either on price or on quality. And if I want color, as I do for climate research papers, .... it is VERY expensive per page. Luckily, in those cases, there are fewer pages! I don't think I need color for many datasheets -- I don't think I've seen many requiring color, which is a good thing.
Thanks for suggesting an option. It's not so overwhelming I'm going to run down and get all those datasheets printed out, though. Have you seen the size of the USB documentation set????
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