Why aren’t startups trying to disrupt the printer industry? It’s been a racket for a long time.
The only reason I can think of is that gouging customers must be the only real way to make money in that industry.
The only reason I can think of is that gouging customers must be the only real way to make money in that industry.
[a]: Everyone complains about airline seat spacing, but nothing short of regulation will fix it because the margins are too thin to not pack everyone like sardines. If you have more leg room on your planes, you make less per flight, and that could put you in the negative.
The Canon inkjet I had was a completely different story. Genuine cartridges cost over $80, can print no more than 100 pages. Most importantly, after I dump the empty cartridges, the scanner stopped working.
We need serious probe into those malicious behaviors.
Maybe there are exceptions beyond consumer price ranges, but the only printer I've seen that actually worked was an inkjet over 20 years ago. Probably because it was too dumb to do anything other than print.
For printers, it's getting hard to even be able to buy something at a premium that will let you refill the toner yourself. But jumping to regulation to fix it is a bit of a leap, especially if your argument relies on the airline ticket thing.
Free markets work well with 100% transparency. That's the assumption in Adam Smith's models. If I buy a printer, and have complete awareness of the pain it will cause me and the long-term costs, and choose to spend $50 over $100, the free market is working fine.
If I go into a store and can't buy a printer without spending hours reading web pages (thousands of dollars of my time), and buy an inferior option due to intentional opacity, we need regulation.
This is very much the latter and not the former.
Airlines have better transparency than printer makers, by far. I might get ripped off on luggage, but I usually know that buying the ticket. I have no way to know a printer will disable itself in 6 months unless I pay HP off.
I blame Carly Fiorina for cannibalizing HP. Before her, it was a brand you could trust. After her, it's scam after scam. Before her, it had solid and unique R&D and brilliant people wanted to go there. After her, not a single competent engineer will work there. In the meantime, HP stock has not kept up with inflation. HP was just above $20 in 2007, and now it's just below $30. It has no fundamentals or competitive advantage in any real way.
In your airline example, focusing on low price is what has lead to budget airlines charging $80 for a carryon.
People just end up spending money they didn’t know they were going to have to spend on a product they probably didn’t want and is often worse quality than the competition.
It’s only good business because people are idiots and the people in these games are out to fleece idiots, not build a brand.
May as well pitch them on manufacturing floppy disks while you're at it. That's a better market because the only competition is new old stock and used disks.
Ink jet is terrible unless you print at least a few times a month, better if you print a couple times a week. Even then, it's not great. Laser is decent, but you have to actually pay for the equipment; once you do, they do scale down to very occasional printing, toner doesn't dry out, etc. I'm sure some of the rubber pieces will fail over time, used or not, that's just how rubber is, but in most climates, that's stil going to take a while.
Related question "Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 with the top comment from somebody who worked at HP printer division (hint: patents)
“The tolerances are very tight,” Ruiz said. “When you’re moving a box from here to there, if you’re off an inch it’s probably fine. But our images cannot be off by more than eighty-five microns”—a third of a thousandth of an inch—“or else they’ll be fuzzy.”
Even the U.S. Postal Service has noticed this.
When shipping a package, you can buy the postage online, then use a QR code on your phone to print the paid label at the Post Office and drop off the package at the same time.
Unless someone comes up with a phenomenally cheaper way of manufacturing printers and the ink, there's not a chance a startup will succeed. I don't think that's gonna happen.
In terms of actual functionality, what's that different between a SOHO laser or home-inkjet printer you buy today, and one made 5 or 10 years ago? Resolution sort of plateaus because beyond 600, maybe 1200dpi, you're seeing diminishing returns. Output speed is capped by dry-time on inkjet (you don't want pages landing in the output tray and smearing the one below) and by power consumption of the fuser on laser. And I suspect that most of the rasterization smarts have been moved to the host, so it's not like there's that much there left to upgrade. The one thing I could say is "maybe duplexers" but they're also established tech, just cheaper and more common.
With a sensible design, they could be using the same basic chassis-- mechanism and cartridge designs-- for 10 years or more, and if they had to design a new control board with some new wireless doodad or USB type Q, that's one small part that can be plugged into an established design.
I'd be perfectly happy with a new HP Laserjet 5. Hell, I'd probably be happy with a new version of the Panasonic dot-matrix I had in high school, if it had Ethernet connectivity.
Of course the money eventually runs out, and those startups are forced to do some nasty things to the customers, who may now find themselves with no one to jump to, as competitors are long dead. But hey, we're talking about printer market here. The incumbents are the leaders in nasty, underhanded, abusive business practices (as well as planned obsolescence, wastefulness, destroying the environment and the climate...) for the entire tech sector. I just can't imagine a startup making this market worse when it runs out of VC subsidies and has to actually make money. Even if it ends up killing the whole market... well, this is printers we're talking about, it's a dying market already, isn't it?
So in this one, rare case, I think it would actually work out great in the end. Of course this is also why no sane investor will fund such startups...
I used to work for a company that made a very nice, but expensive, dye-sub printer.
They decided not to continue the line, which disappointed a lot of folks, as the printers actually had some of the best tech, in them, but it wasn't worth it.
Printers from 20 years ago were pretty ok, so patents shouldn't matter much by simply building old-fashioned ones.
At this point, I suspect there may be a rule in economics that says roughly: it's better if your customers have to spend less money with you, but more often, than more money but less frequently. I.e. it's better to have them spend $1 every month with you than $12 every year. And I feel it could hold even if you correct for time value of money - it seems the businesses see some value in the frequency of repeat interactions with a customer itself.