HP as a company is just like Uber… it is a thief!

If you ask me to name 3 most evil companies in the world it would be Monsanto, Enron & Uber… and it need not be in that order!!! You can add HP to it… actually its a little too harsh… HP is not as Evil as Monsanto, Enron or Uber but it can be said that HP has adopted wrong priorities… at least in Inkjet printing. Not surprising these profiteering companies are from USA… just like the expensive EV car companies promising to turn the world green & clean if we buy their expensive EV products. How can one make sustainable products out of unsustainable & illogically priced products???!!!

These companies have mastered the science to screw the customer and yet get the customer to love it!!!

Perfect example is…of Uber rider who says Uber is a great company even though every ride of the same kilometer or distance has a different price.”Surge pricing” in normal english language was called OVERCHARGING your customer when he has no choice!!! It was so looked down upon in earlier times even though it happened rarely when cabbies had to operate  during riots, Strikes, very bad/unusual weather, flooding, etc where the threat to the life itself of the driver and the taxi were at stake and such events happened maybe once or twice a year.

UBER charges surge prices daily especially during peak hours… but isn’t that the time when people require taxies the most???!!? And during the rest of the day by keeping low fares UBER actually discourages the drivers from driving pointing out to drive during surge to make the most.

But today EVERYBODY is ok with Uber’s surge-pricing that too DAILY and ANYTIME of the day (now this surge is a situation which Uber also can create artificially through its servers whenever required.

Uber tries to explain this by saying surge pricing is used to be fair on the driver yet why on earth do they take profit on that extra surge price when Uber does not undergo ANY additional server expense or any other expenses for sending out pickup-requests during peak hours (a driver undergoes slight monetary loss during peak hours because his car stops a lot or slows down greatly during peak hours traffic and the petrol expenses increases and at the same time the number of trips reduce). In such a scenario Uber SHOULD NOT charge a percentage of the surge “profit”. Uber fleeces riders as there is no accurate yardstick with the customer to check if they are being overcharged as much as Rs 1 or Rs 5 or Rs 10. Not many riders know that under the protection of “multiple parameters” UBER fleeces its customers low amounts below Rs10 now if there are a 100,000 drivers in India doing at least 10 rides a day then on over charging these riders an amount as low as Rs1 Uber is illegally able to make a windfall of Rs 100,000 x 10 rides x Rs 1 = Rs 10,00,000 (Rs 1million) daily and 3billion anually!!! These are some astounding figures to make ILLEGALLY other than its profit!!! (Then there is the other half where it cheats the driver and takes Rs 1, Rs 5 & Rs10 from his pocket and also during promotions when they straight out refuses to pay the drivers citing some rules they could not qualify by… most of their driver-promos are only for newbie-drivers anyway. They even have impossible targets like to get Rs 4,500 the driver has to do 13 drops of which 10 has to be during peak aka “surge” time which is anyway impossible due to heavy traffic).

If an old-fashioned cab driver overcharged you would have screamed “CHEATING” and pulled him to the Police but with UBER you just cannot complain against it to anybody other than the company itself and also UBER “JUSTFIY” its profiteering on its social media and website you AGREE to abide by it. Its somewhat like how the Government taxes you… but its like.. er.. with Uber you have the CHOICE and you CHOOSE to be screwed by Uber…!!!

Today customer is no longer the KING. The company-profit is the “King” and you as a company only have to JUSTIFY the unusual or high pricing to the customers using some good words based on “enhanced user experience”… just like Apple does!!!

This is exactly what happens with HP. Everybody who uses HP and its stupid inkjet printers know that every year they unleash newer models not only of their printers but their ink cartridge as well.They do this to safeguard their profits… but do they even ever think from a customer’s point of view? Why the customer has to keep up with all these changes and pain of finding a genuine cartridge.

Many a time at least one of the 4 colours (yellow, blue, magenta & black) is out of stock and it takes months before it shows up in the shops. Now this happens due to logistical problem of stocking a huge quantity of just 4 colours and these ink have an expiry date so its a huge problem for the dealer or shopkeeper to stockpile this huge number of cartridges especially as these inks are not very fast moving (home users buy one set say every 3 to 4 months).

HP has taken a simple printing technology (thats why its so cheap that the ink cartridge is almost as expensive to develop especially if you are going to put IC chips in it) and complicated the life out of it! Through the last 10yrs I personally had to throw 2 perfectly working printers in the garbage and get a new one just because I couldn’t get the cartridges for it in any of the places, malls or HP dealers.

With HP the cartridge is more expensive than the ink. Of all the product in the world the only other example is common salt where the plastic packet is more expensive than the salt itself.

The inks are upgraded by HP annually to keep ahead of the illegal ink re-filling markets or sellers (now this is a race that HP can never win, whatever technology it creates there is always a hack around it). The latest is putting a Chip in every single HP ink cartridge… now this is a huge cost and add to it the R&D that HP has to hand out huge amounts to keep abreast of the printing technology only to run ahead of the “ink refillers”. Therefore, by doing this HP has today many variety and these various inks takes up a huge footprint area in ALL shops just to display all of its ink cartridges.

Instead of doing all this HP could have got into the “Re-filling” business and it would have been a huge success!

So the message is HP Inkjet Printers in their current form are UN-SUSTAINABLE and expensive… STAY AWAY FROM HP Inkjet Printers… especially when there are other printers which are as good and the price of the inks are one third the price of HP inks. Eg Brother printer ink is same price/cheaper than HP yet for me or for the usual home user it will last the full year (3 times longer than HP ink)!!!

Brother not only provides a full bottle of all its ink but it also provides an extra bottle of the Black ink as people use black for printing much more… it was a good & kind thought from Brother.

The moment I held these ink bottles in my hand it struck me like a thunderbolt… such a kind (regenerative) thought  can only come from Asia and that too from Japan! If ever there is any problem with US companies it is that they have been skewed towards their profits way too much than caring two bits for their consumers/customers or even people!!! Its the same with Microsoft, Apple, DVD-region codes, GMO crops, attempting Seed-control while talking of providing food to the poor, lecturing the wold on Global Warming while being the biggest manufacturer AND exporter of Coal, bombing rich self-sufficient countries who had very high living standards (even better than USA) like Iraq, Libya, Syria in to stone age while talking about stopping terror… even the so called “AID” given by USA is used to earn military & economic PROFITS from the poorest of poor countries and manipulating these countries’ economic policies to earn 1,000 times the size profit of the original AID!

Compared with Brother printers the HP printers were a little bit (10%) more user friendly and had a few led lights here and there to show WIFI “connected” & “power-on” but thats about it… I can’t be bothered by HP anymore I am done with HP… it was a long, painful and expensive relationship and I am happy I am done with HP printers.

And I advise anybody thinking about buying inkjet printers to buy the “ink tank printers”. Brother DCP-T700W which comes with ADF (automatic document feeder) and is thus a complete printer/scanner than DCP=T500W. Ink-tanks make for very cheap ink printing as you just pay for the dye that comes in normal plastic bottles and not for any special hard plastic cartridge with circuits and IC chips. Thus the cost of printing are as cheap as laser printer if not cheaper. As more people go for Brother there is no doubt there will be bigger ink bottles and the unit cost of ink would fall even further.

There is no iota of doubt why HP would sooner or later close down its inkjet printers & cartridges department. HP is already in deep trouble and divide the section into two and in a few years will decide which to keep and which to let go.

The service oriented and environment conscious East is taking the technology-baton away from the profiteering and destructive minded West in all walks of life. If west is content only by company bottom-line and do not think from the humane and customer’s perspective then they would surely be at a loss.

How to Install Brother Drivers for Ubuntu: