Hacker News Reader

Comment by richthegeek | Hacker News Reader

Without (ab)using patents, DMCA, etc to prevent 3rd-party products their business model would not be sustainable.

If your business cannot survive without a government-granted monopoly, it's not a free market.

Sure, it's not a free market. What does that have to do with what I said?

My claim is that reasonable printers that are free of bullshit exist for most purposes (prior to Epson switching to reservoir printers, the home color printer market was pretty thin) and yet companies that do use bullshit tactics continue to exist. So the printers exist (patents have not particularly held them back) and for some reason enough people ignore these reasonable printers for companies using abusive tactics to survive.

The strategy people should be following is to buy the printer based on the cost of consumables. It's what I do. But most people do the strategy of

1. find the model where the company subsidizes the printer to sell the ink

2. Then try to work around the lockouts the company has on the ink market.

Both sides are trying to screw each other over. I see no reason to care. If the people trying to use third-party ink really succeed, all that will happen is that the market strategy will disappear, and so the third-party ink market will vanish. (I really wonder how you run a business where if you really win you go out of business. You need to hope the other side keeps on fighting just enough that you can attract all the people who enjoy fighting over pennies.)

You are assuming that the average customer knows that the company is subsidizing the printer to sell the ink. . . I don't think that is true. I think the average person sees a great deal on a printer and is genuinely surprised when they find it drinks ink like it's Octoberfest.

At the time of purchase you can find these things out by researching the price of the replacement ink cartridge and its page rating. (Page rating is soft/fudgeable but should at least be a reasonable way to ballpark the lifespan of the cartridge.) I would consider this cursory research when evaluating a purchase that takes an ongoing supply of consumables.

To me it sort of seems like you're saying "Wow this dryer uses way more electricity than I thought it would!" or "Wow I bought this razor handle and the blades are really expensive!" or "Wow Swiffer really screws you with the replacement wipes!" or "Wow this car takes expensive tires!" -- even though the numbers for the ongoing consumables were available at the time of purchase.

So every time I buy a swifter or razor or dryer I have to do thorough research on things like power consumption, cost of replacement parts etc. No! I have a life, I have other things to do. I buy from large brand names like Lexar because I expect them to be honest and engage in fair dealing and because researching every aspect of products I buy would be a full time job in itself.

I get where you're coming from, but this concept you take issue with goes by another name: "due diligence"

I'd even argue that selling a cheap ~$50 printer and then expecting to make it back on consumables is a legitimate business model. If you're the kind of person who prints once in a blue moon, it makes more sense than buying a ~$200 laser printer.

Printers are generally expensive and generally last a few years. They're not casual, off-the-cuff purchases. Much like a computer, they are a precision machine, but with many more moving parts. I really don't believe it's unreasonable to do a couple hours worth of research on something that'll be in your home or office, possibly doing Important Serious Business Things, for years.

Actually if you print that infrequently you'd probably be better off with one of those 'office stores' as a print service.

The problem is lack of knowledge, the average customer, including me when I bought my current crappy printer, doesn't have enough knowledge to know that certain printers eat ink. In fact, printer companies that use these sales tactics are relying on lack of customer knowledge. So it's not really reasonable to say that people are ingoring good companies and going to ones that use abusive tactics, its' more that people just don't know.

I get that the customer has some responsibilities, but it doesn't make sense to say that the customer has to exhaustively reserach the ethics of every single company they buy something from. That would make buying a full time job considering our complex modern economy where customers regularly interact with many many companies and buy many many things

The problem with the "it's not a free market" argument is that ultimately almost nothing is a purely free market when you drill down. Not only that, but wether a market free or not has only tangential relation to the question of if the market is competitive - which is what most people are actually after when they start talking about free markets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com