HP's Strange Obsession With WebOS For Printers

ryzvonusef writes "VentureBeat's (typically unnamed) sources identifies Intel and Qualcomm as being involved in talks for acquiring the Palm asset portfolio. However, citing sources intimate with HP's negotiations, it reports that the company wants to be able to license webOS back for use in printers; it wants it so much, in fact, that the issue has become 'a crucial part' of discussions. Maybe there's something about webOS and printers that HP knows and the rest of the world doesn't."

Comments

We B OS

[alphatel]

Maybe they finally realized that the "HP Universal Print Driver" is neither Universal nor a Print Driver.
Discuss...

Re:We B OS

[o'reor]

Certainly not Universal till it reaches version v42.0 .

Re:We B OS

[VIPERsssss]

I remember when an inkjet driver fit on a fucking 3.5 floppy, had pretty much the same print quality, and didn't install a goddamn update service, system tray, and a "helper" app.

Yes, I am angry about this.

Re:We B OS

[alphatel]

webLos wobble but they don't fall down?

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

are you new type of idiot?

Re:We B OS

[Bert64]

Well, the update service is to make up for the lack of an update system built into the OS...
The rest can really be done without.

Try Linux if you want sensible printer drivers, especially for HP printers... No helper apps, uses the update service already built into the OS etc.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they finally realized that the "HP Universal Print Driver" is neither Universal nor a Print Driver.
Discuss...

HP used to make decent printers with decent printer drivers. My office still has some HP 4000 series laserjets that work perfectly.

Then HP started with crappy printer drivers that would install two background services (Pml Driver HPZ12 & Net Driver HPZ12). As a result, these printer drivers don't work well as shared network printers, or with windows terminal services. These services also crash frequently & have had security exploits.

Re:We B OS

[jbolden]

There are small drivers for HP. You don't have to install the entire machinery. Most HP printers support PCL, PDF some still support Postscript. Just send generic print codes to your printer and don't bother with the HP software.

Re:We B OS

[jbolden]

Buy ethernet printers rather than sharing USB printers and you won't have that problem. Buy stuff designed for how you want to use it.

Re:We B OS

[BitZtream]

How long has it been since you used windows? Mine has no problem updating itself. It's also more than happy to update printer drivers. Well, assuming the printer vendor can make them stable enough to pass basic tests ...

Maybe youve heard of Windows Update?

Re:We B OS

[VIPERsssss]

Are they similar to the old Xenix and Unix drivers, 'cause those were fun. :-/

Re:We B OS

[alphatel]

The HP Universal is the default for all Ethernet HP printers. Try finding a different driver for anything built after 2009, even the $10,000 color laserjets.

Re:We B OS

[sarhjinian]

This.

The cheaper printers are just that: cheap. They offload most of the rasterization onto the host PC, have no job control features and are generally awful. Ethernet-capable printers usually, but don't always, help, because printer makers are shovelling out some awful crap.

You can still get small print drivers for HP's modern printers. The problem is that those printers are expensive, but then again, so were the "Good ol' days" printers they replaced.

Here's a tip: check to see if the printer supports PJL (not just PCL) and/or PostScript (or a compatible derivative, like Kyocera's KPDL). If it supports PJL and/or PS, you can be guaranteed a) that the drivers will be small, b) that the printer will work pretty well, and c) that you'll pay for the privilege of A and B.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows update notifies you of driver updates for quite some time now. Basically since at least Windows 98.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have loved to figure out how to do that when I was trying to get an HP LJ1000 to work on XP. The HP-supplied driver always tried to send some firmware upgrade to the printer when the computer booted up. If the printer hadn't been shut off (warm reboot), the firmware upgrade locked up the printer (because it had already been upgraded).

Getting it to work on Vista later was another trick and a half.

Re:We B OS

[gparent]

Well, the update service is to make up for the lack of an update system built into the OS...
The rest can really be done without.

Just because you haven't used Windows in 14 years and have absolutely no clue what you're saying doesn't mean you need to spread your that ignorance to everyone else on the site in order to promote Linux.

Re:We B OS

[gparent]

And yes 14 was an approximation.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean it sometimes notifes you that you can "update" your driver to an old version that would undo the fix for which you just installed a new driver version.
Luckily it doesn't offer anything at all for about 70% of all hardware.

Re:We B OS

[gbjbaanb]

just because there's an update service in Windows doesn't mean its readily available to HP. I've only seen a few drivers in there - realtek mainly for my system.

How much does it cost to add your binaries to Windows Update? The Linux system is still far superior, partly because its free to add your code to it, and partly because even if you didn't want that, you can include your own update repository to it.

Re:We B OS

[lindi]

Offloading rasterization has great benefits though. For every postscript printer there seems to be at least one file that causes it to reboot or (worse) get stuck. Such problems are much easier to fix when the postscript interpreter runs on the PC.

Re:We B OS

[Dishevel]

Can we just decide as a group that we will never mention HP print drivers.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when a OS fit on a 3.5" floppy...not surprising that drivers have grown along with the OS.

Re:We B OS

[alexandre_ganso]

There are some standard windows driver for SOME hp printers. Which never seems to be the case of the one you have in hand. But their driver downloads are in the order of magnitude of the hundreds of megabytes, and they install their own update services plus a crapload of stuff that you never use.

Re:We B OS

[alexandre_ganso]

No, they are apple's.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

If I understand your English correctly, you're angry, not about the driver bloat, but that you are old enough to remember those days? Don't worry, a few more years and you'll have Alzheimer's, then you won't remember.

Re:We B OS

[TheLink]

They offload most of the rasterization onto the host PC, have no job control features and are generally awful.

Nowadays most host PCs have enough hardware grunt to manage most rasterization needs. Even USB2.0 is good enough for home users[1].

It's a software problem, it doesn't have to be that crappy and so it's HP's fault :).

[1] 1200 dpi * 1200 dpi * 8.27 * 11.69 * 256 levels of grey = 140MB (if your printer can only do pure black or white 1200dpi dots then it's 17.5MB). Without compression and assuming 30MB/sec USB transfer rate that's about 4.6 seconds to transfer a page to the printer. Which is about 12 to 13 pages per minute.

Re:We B OS

[sarhjinian]

It's not the gruntwork of rasterizing---I agree you could write a decent rasterizer that isn't a buggy piece of crap. The problem was that people are complaining about huge printer driver sizes, and part of the reason is the rasterizer/interpreter needs to be included.

The other point is that, well, on-host rasterization is usually a trait of poor-quality printers. It's not a direct correlation, just a harbinger, and it's not the fault of on-host rasterization, but if you avoid it and get printers that do this on-device you'll get a smaller driver and a better printer. You'll just pay more for it.

Re:We B OS

[517714]

Windows Update will update generic printer drivers, but if you want the drivers that allow duplex printing, multiple page reduction, high resolution, economy settings, etc. and support the other features available in a typical laser printer then you must install the drivers yourself, and Windows Update does not apply.

Re:We B OS

[517714]

Apple's is iB OS.

Re:We B OS

[sexconker]

The HP Universal is the default for all Ethernet HP printers. Try finding a different driver for anything built after 2009, even the $10,000 color laserjets.

God that driver is a piece of shit.
Dell has a "universal" print driver too, and I have never gotten it to work. The closest I've gotten is getting it to list a connected printer.

Re:We B OS

[jbolden]

I'm not seeing it. Once you get over about $100 you have printers that support PCL at the very least. For example the
P2035 which is $250 has PCL5
M175 which is $300 has HP PCL 6, HP PCL 5c, HP postscript level 3 emulation, PDF (v1.7)
At the top of the line something like the
6015 has HP PCL 6, HP PCL 5c, HP postscript level 3

Where are these expensive printers with host only printing. I understand HP Universal is the default but use a generic driver if you don't like it.

Re:We B OS

[jonbryce]

Or maybe they think people will want their printer to tweet or post a facebook status update every time they print something.

Re:We B OS

[jbolden]

They aren't even that expensive. I've been using a HP CP2025dn for a few years now. Printers runs like $300 today for color duplex laser. This is the first printer I've ever owned that can do everything I've wanted in a workgroup printer. I'm going through about $70 black / yr and $200 color / 4 yrs. Not bad for a dream printer.

Re:We B OS

[alexandre_ganso]

I was referring to linux printer drivers, aka cups

Re:We B OS

[jbolden]

If you want low level control of Postscript HP printers almost all come with PCL. RIP postscript to PCL on your computer and send the PCL. Ghostscript works well can be pushed into your printer driver. That's what I used to do when I had Postscript jobs and didn't have a RIP on my printers.

Re:We B OS

[jbolden]

You aren't going to get 30 MB/sec from the protocol. You would be lucky to get 1/2 that.

But that's not the real issue. The real issue is what sarhjinian mentioned. The two types of printers that don't have rastorization onboard are: absolute bottom and absolute top end.

Re:We B OS

[rev0lt]

You probably mean Apple (CUPS is property of Apple). And you also forgot to mention the subpar print quality, feature-incomplete drivers and lack of accurate color management.

Re:We B OS

[jbolden]

Yes I've made the mistake of these sorts of heavy drivers, never again.

You get the best information from HP's Linux site: https://launchpad.net/hplip and http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/ and find out what the rasorization engine is. From there get a generic one for Windows. Of course if the printer can do anything on its own just use a generic driver, Window's drivers are also annoyingly complex. I general would go up from the 1000 series to not have host based printing if you are going to use Windows.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting all that works fine on my Samsung laserjet I just updated with windows update on Vista no less...

Re:We B OS

[rev0lt]

CUPS belongs to Apple since at least 2007. Check the footer on their website http://www.cups.org/

Re:We B OS

[alexandre_ganso]

I know. They have been using it, and developing it, since before mac os panther...

And it is a much smarter solution than 500MB+ hp printer drivers anyway.

Re:We B OS

[geekboybt]

"Try Linux if you want sensible printer drivers"

My oh my, how far we've come.

Re:We B OS

[TheLink]

You aren't going to get 30 MB/sec from the protocol.

Why not? I get 30MB/sec when copying stuff to/from a USB HDD.

It's never going to hit the theoretical 60MB/sec (480Mbps), but I'm certainly not the only one who has managed to get 30MB/sec from a USB interface.

See the USB drives near the bottom:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/external-hard-drive-charts/Maximum-Read-Transfer-Rate,696.html

Re:We B OS

[nospam007]

"...didn't install a goddamn update service, system tray, and a "helper" app. "

I remember too. Their driver replaced the Windows Spooler service with their own and all the machines where it was installed began polling _all_ the printers in our company, all 3000 of them, to check if they still had paper, bringing the network to a stop.
It was a nightmare.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linux system is still far superior

Ohhhh really?

"hey my xyz printer works fine"
20 responses of try abc and def as they sort of worked for me once.
2-3 responses of works fine
1 final response of the package maintainer saying he has no idea what is going on
Thread closed.

From an end user point of view it is really no different.

I am pretty good at this stuff and can dig around and make my own drivers if I like. But I dont want to mess with that I just want a system that, oh I dont know, works. Even my bog standard netbook (and most dont stray too far from the intel refernce design) I usually have to dink around with config files to get something to work right. Just about the same as in windows I have to dig around and find the right drivers usually (on the manufacture sites usually).

Some people (much like you) equate "I know how to do this" with "easier". Easy is push a button and magic happens (even better I do not have to do that). If I have to crack open 2-3 apps and a command line to fix something that is NOT easier. I just know how to do it.

Re:We B OS

[datapharmer]

ahem... I've had windows update bork enough display adapters, monitors network cards and printers that there is no way I would allow it to update them. Recent example (not hardware, but still): have you tried installing sql 2008 r2 sp1 or sql 2008 sp3 using windows update.... it goes haywire about 1/5 of the time!

Re:We B OS

[X0563511]

Yea, the official response is "try again" - lol!

Re:We B OS

[X0563511]

Once upon a time I used Adobe's postscript printer driver and a linux postscript definition file to get one of them to work. That was crazy stupid.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg487434

A quick google indicates that you can have your update by emailing someone at MSFT. You can also include an automatic web downloader if you want, for more complex deliveries.

Re:We B OS

[jbolden]

Bad division. I was thinking you were talking max not 1/2 max. Sorry we were agreeing, and I was screwing the math.

Re:We B OS

[shutdown -p now]

It all depends on the printer manufacturer - they can do it the Right Way and put it all in the driver that's on WU, or they can require you to download and install a 100Mb "print app".

Re:We B OS

[Spaseboy]

It's obvious you've never used CUPS. Even legacy and exotic printers work perfect on Linux. Linux uses the exact same printing system as Mac OS X.

Re:We B OS

[hb79]

> How long has it been since you used windows?

About 10 years, give or take. I didn't realise it was still around. Or as it already gone through its faded cycle, and come back as retro hip?

Re:We B OS

[VIPERsssss]

LOL Smartass /have a butterscotch

Re:We B OS

[nine-times]

Not true. HP is just distributing some crap drivers these days.

Re:We B OS

[rev0lt]

Except that CUPS drivers are usually very basic and with lower quality than their windows counterparts, specially with HP inkjet products. Even the HP drivers for OSX seems to be second-class when compared with Windows.

Re:We B OS

[Lord_Jeremy]

Actually of all the print drivers that I have installed on my Mac OS X systems, the HP ones have always been the smallest. Took a look under the hood one day and found that I had hundreds of separate printer definition files for various Epson models despite owning one cruddy Epson Inkjet. Meanwhile theres seemed to be one small generic driver package (postscript-based? do people still use that?) for my HP Laserjet.

Re:We B OS

[rdnetto]

I remember using Win 3.1 (installed from 6 floppies), and even then HP's printer drivers took 3 floppies. Something is very wrong when the drivers are half the size of the OS.

Re:We B OS

[justforgetme]

Isn't that the program microsoft invented to deploy the Windows genuine advantage piracy checker?
I remember it locking down my sony vaio back in 2006 along with about 20k devices that used the same vendor key..
Apart from this I can't remember it having done anything ever. In win7 they added the additional languages functionality to
it, that was helpful for about twelve seconds.

Re:We B OS

[justforgetme]

No, they just can't accept the fact that they shot themselves in the head by giving up a maturing venture and
are stubbornly trying to repurpose the software they developed to show shareholders that they could still
extract value from it.
It is textbook shareholder marketing. The problem with this is that:
"NO CONSUMER GIVES A FUCK ABOUT A TWEETING PRINTER"

Re:We B OS

[IAN]

Are they similar to the old Xenix and Unix drivers, 'cause those were fun. :-/

Thank you for reminding me. I'll be twitching for the rest of the day. Funny how much outright crap one can remember -- I thought those neurons have long died off out of sheer disgust.

For the mercifully uninitiated, SCO Unix had a baroque system of little configuration files, object modules, a severely handicapped C compiler, and a similarly crippled linker for the purpose of modifyng kernel parameters and installing third-party drivers, both of which required re-linking the whole kernel (sysctl? dynamic data structures? run-time linkable modules? never heard. OK, it was the early '90s, but still.)

SCO, in their infinite wisdom, tried to make driver installation "user friendly": you would unpack the archive, start the installation script, and a few minutes later reboot to a freshly built kernel. Of course this failed to account for buggy scripts, weird configurations, and cargo-cult admins, any of which could make an unholy mess of the system and/or render it unbootable. I've had the dubious pleasure of cleaning up a number of such messes.

Re:We B OS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, I can still install generic drivers for a Laserjet 4 Plus, regular or postscript, that support RET, duplexing, adjustable printer memory, installed font cartridges, etc etc, just by hitting the 'windows update' button after creating the network port.

They're not available by default, no, but they are literally one click away and do not get sourced from anywhere but Redmond.

Re:We B OS

[gbjbaanb]

oooh, who feels far too strongly about this. lol

The problem is with Microsoft. They will happily bundle a browser, media player, and soon an AV system with the OS for free, yet they will not let other companies access to the system's update mechanism without charging a fortune for it. I don't think you can claim the 'profitable' line considering how much stuff MS gives away for free. Opening the update system so other manufacturers could include their own repositories wouldn't bankrupt them overnight.

Its not HPs fault - or its also every other manufacturer's fault too, I have a java updater, a ATI updater, an Adobe updater, an updater built into my browser, my mail client, my paint program .. almost everything has to do their own updaters.

The other OSes are a superior in this regard, obviously and totally. Maybe Bert64 just forgot about Windows (or Microsoft) Update, which is understandable as its practically only used by MS themselves.

Re:We B OS

[Pigskin-Referee]

Well, the update service is to make up for the lack of an update system built into the OS...
The rest can really be done without.

Try Linux if you want sensible printer drivers, especially for HP printers... No helper apps, uses the update service already built into the OS etc.

Are you joking? Finding printer drivers compatible with Linux is hard enough. Finding ones that work with FreeBSD is virtually impossible. Good luck finding a Brother color laser printer driver that works on FreeBSD. I have had scores of ink-jet printers that have no drivers available under Linux.

And it gets worse. I have seen all to many cases where a printer will work under one applications but not another in Linux/*BSD. If I have a printer that absolutely, positive must work I use it via Windows. At least I am sure I can use the printer to its full capacity.

Re:We B OS

[gparent]

I feel far less strong about this than the idiots who rated my post Troll when it was actually Insightful. Considering my posts didn't actually have any trolling parts, shows you how pathetic they get when you make them realize what they're doing instead of properly arguing with facts...

How much does it cost? Do you have proof that it is a fortune or are you simply lying? Why didn't HP come out with an update system that other manufacturers could use to push updates? Considering the amount of excessive packaging they give away for free, maybe they have some spare money laying around? They already have to pay people to write their own updater anyway.

If MS doesn't provide a feature that others can easily write and make work, then it's not MS' fault that others are too stupid and incompetent to do it themselves. Linus and the FSF didn't write apt, others did. Plus they already get sued for including things that literally every body wants in a desktop OS (web browser and media player), and they've already written the feature you want, so the only thing remaining is for manufacturers to wake the fuck up and start using it. It's HP's fault but not wanting to use the tools provided to them or to make something equivalent on their own.

palm?

[galaad2]

*facePALM*

THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gold I tells you !!

Re:THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[the linux geek]

That would certainly explain the price of toner.

Re:THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[SJHillman]

Ink is not toner. Toner is reasonably priced compared to inkjet cartridges, which is why there's only silver in toner cartridges. And I saw this with my hands covered in toner after spending the past hour digging through a HP LaserJet looking for a damned stuck sensor.

Re:THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[Nadaka]

what are they adding to the ink that is worth more than gold?

IIRC Inkjet ink costs 8 times the price of gold by weight. (Don't know how that price has changed in the last few years though).

Re:THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[garyebickford]

AFAIK it's still around $4500 per gallon.

Re:THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[Grishnakh]

what are they adding to the ink that is worth more than gold?
IIRC Inkjet ink costs 8 times the price of gold by weight.

Profit, lots and lots of pure profit.

Re:THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[oldmac31310]

They used to dilute it with champagne but that was too cheap. No idea what they are using since they stopped using gold. Ground unicorn horns perhaps?

Re:THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[hb79]

Ever heard of the Gillette business model? Yeah, same thing with printers.

In fact, inkjet printers are mentioned as an example in the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebie_marketing

It could be a leverage point

[Chrisq]

Looking at the picture of the printer I can imagine that if HP wanted to get back in to tablets they could just have a cheap printer with a detachable control unit...

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Xest]

There's more to it than this, I have one of these printers and don't use it very often, however last night I was sat playing BF3 and notice something out the corner of my eye. The thing had switched itself on and it's front end on the tablet thing was staring at me with the blue light on the printer flashing, as if it was trying to communicate with me, as if it felt the need to make me acknowledge it's presence.

I suspect HP does know something we don't know about WebOS, and that's that it is sentient. HP understands that if it doesn't retain a close relationship now, that when these things start to learn to do other things, like walk, and weild machine guns, then it risks suffering the same kind of enslavement as the rest of us. Me? I'm not too worried, I said "there there" to my printer in a calm voice, fed it some paper, and said "time to sleep" before gently turning it off. I hope this will be enough, that if I'm kind to it now, it will spare me when the day comes.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[nedlohs]

This is the most rational explanation for HPs behaviour I've heard. Well that and LSD in the water in the board room.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[alphax45]

Wish I had mod points to mod this! Made me snort from laughing at my desk :)

Re:It could be a leverage point

[AmiMoJo]

The realised a few years ago that there was no point competing at the bottom end of the inkjet printer market. Rather than join the race to the bottom they decided to re-position themselves are more of a premium brand. Their current models have colour LCD screens and you can plug a digital camera in directly. Then there is wifi connectivity and photo-enhancement. There is already quite a bit of software in there just to handle that stuff, and going to a full OS with installable apps is the next logical step.

Unfortunately for the consumer it makes no sense. For cheap colour printing a laser printer is better and cheaper overall, and for high quality photo prints is to cheaper to just order them online or at a photo shop. Let them worry about all the expensive inks and paper required, or the blocked print heads and paper jams.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Chrisq]

This is the most rational explanation for HPs behaviour I've heard. Well that and LSD in the water in the board room.

Surely the poster must be the next HP CEO.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Chrisq]

The realised a few years ago that there was no point competing at the bottom end of the inkjet printer market. Rather than join the race to the bottom they decided to re-position themselves are more of a premium brand. Their current models have colour LCD screens and you can plug a digital camera in directly. Then there is wifi connectivity and photo-enhancement. There is already quite a bit of software in there just to handle that stuff, and going to a full OS with installable apps is the next logical step.

Unfortunately for the consumer it makes no sense. For cheap colour printing a laser printer is better and cheaper overall, and for high quality photo prints is to cheaper to just order them online or at a photo shop. Let them worry about all the expensive inks and paper required, or the blocked print heads and paper jams.

True. I make do with a cheap monochrome laser and online printing for the rare occasions when colour is necessary.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Xest]

Well why do you think they're so confused about ditching their PC division? On one hand it'll appease the printer faction when the war begins, on the other hand there's potential that the PC faction will defeat the printers and so HP puts itself in danger offending them too. HP is stuck right in the middle of this upcoming war the poor bastards.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Mortimer82]

I just bought an HP monochrome laser printer which runs over WiFi, a LaserJet 1102w, I needed it to print out Mathcad assignments and it will also be useful for printing out the occasional online tickets.

A very interesting feature (which was not really promoted) is that the drivers for the printer are on it. Initially I had to plug it in via USB (it has no RJ45 port) to configure the WiFi password and the printer presents itself to Windows as a mass storage device with the drivers on. Once the the WiFi networking was set up, I could access the printer by a web interface, which also has the drivers available for "download" for other clients. Although it came with a CD, never needed it, and never needed to access the internet.

It's little convenient things like this which I am willing to pay for and even though I didn't do a lot of research apart from seeing what my usual online retailer sold and choosing from that, I am exceptionally happy with it. I chose HP because whenever I have worked with them, they always seemed fairly "solid" in terms of reliability and finding drivers on their website has never been a challenge.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point, but the printer you are talking about uses Android as the OS.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Anonymous Coward]

There is already quite a bit of software in there just to handle that stuff, and going to a full OS with installable apps is the next logical step.

What's logical about that? That seems completely crazy to me. Reading an image file over USB (a seldom used feature in my experience anyway) is not really what you would call tantamount to having a full OS with apps. I want to browse the Web on my printer? I want to play Angry Birds or run a spreadsheet app? Not logical at all.

"There's already a bunch of software on there, so it makes sense to add a whole ton more" is exactly the kind of thinking you'd expect at a terribly-run company like HP.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Xest]

That's a bit harsh, I've never had an inappropriate relationship or been accused of sexual harassment in my life!

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Grishnakh]

Wrong. It only claims to use Android, so that people don't realize it's really running the sentient WebOS and is secretly plotting to take over the world.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Grishnakh]

Unfortunately for the consumer it makes no sense. For cheap colour printing a laser printer is better and cheaper overall, and for high quality photo prints is to cheaper to just order them online or at a photo shop. Let them worry about all the expensive inks and paper required, or the blocked print heads and paper jams.

Wrong. Laser printers don't offer the same profit margin to HP that inkjets and their overpriced ink do. So with plenty of marketing and slightly lower initial costs, they'll convince consumers that they shouldn't bother with laser printers and should instead buy one of their fancy new color inkjets with color LCD screens, SD card slots, wifi, etc., and that they absolutely must buy genuine HP ink cartridges which will print an enormous 50 pages before drying out and needing to be replaced.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Gilmoure]

Yup, my HP LJ1200 is still humming along. I've replaced the paper tray twice and torn it down to clean off rollers and touch up the initial paper grabber thing with some of that secretary finger sticky stuff they use to flip through papers. And have only used 3 cartridges since I got this in early Oughts.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Grishnakh]

Screw that, I use nice monochrome lasers previously used in offices; my current one is a $100 LaserJet 2300d (50k pages/month duty cycle, 5k pages per cartridge, duplex, Postscript, and network card), and I just picked up a Xerox WorkCentre M20i for $140 which is a MFC with 50-sheet ADF, 550-sheet tray, 8k pages per toner cartridge, built-in ethernet, duplexing, network scanning, etc. By getting something a few years old that was lightly used in a corporate environment, you can get a machine that originally sold for $1-2k, is extremely fast, more importantly is extremely reliable unlike any consumer junk, has extremely cheap replacement toner cartridges (the HP cartridges are $25 each on Ebay; I usually get a 2-pack for $45-50 which lasts for several years), and doesn't have any software/driver problems because it's Postscript.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Xest, I have held back out of respect for your dear departed mother but since you seem to be destined for greater things I will just remind you that you, she and I had an all night threesome on 20 Oct 1993 after you blackmailed me about those pictures of me and the horse. If that is not harassment, surely it must be inappropriate? I still have flashbacks sometimes..

Posting anonymously, because you know who I am.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[517714]

I think it wanted a reach around. My dad's HP printer periodically "masturbates". It wakes up, adjusts itself furiously for five minutes, squirts out some ink and goes back to sleep. It never wakes up by itself when a print job is sent to it though. I have owned HP LaserJets for 23 years, but I wouldn't touch one of their InkJets.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[geekboybt]

Picked up one of those for my parents as well, thought that the built-in drivers were a nice touch, even though they'll be outdated soon enough. Still though, that model is also compatible with AirPrint, so my mother's iPad and parents' iPhones print to it perfectly. Rather nifty, especially for the $85.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[AmiMoJo]

You plank, you didn't read what I said correctly, did you?

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Anonymous Coward]

> I want to browse the Web on my printer?

People store their pictures in various cloud applications (Flickr, Picasa, etc), so this isn't the craziest use case.

And, in the future, many people will not own a personal computer, only mobile devices, which means peripherals such as printers need to be smarter stand-alone devices.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[HiThere]

Their OfficeJet like, however, is also bad. A recent one will only print of paper that's the right **COLOR** for gods sake. And if I want to print on green paper, or card stock, I need to switch into draft mode. (Admittedly, the quality of the draft mode isn't that bad.)

This is an unacceptable piece of garbage, and a good reason to not buy HP again.

And if they think that by this kind of trick they're going to get me to pay more money for a more expensive product, they can think again. I take it as a quality statement about their entire line of printers. ALL of them. (By the time I buy my next printer, all the model numbers will have changed anyway, so I can't just particular models. Only companies.)

Re:It could be a leverage point

[cerberusss]

"When the day comes, count me in with the robot smashers" -- Anonymous, here on slashdot

(I was never able to find the exact source comment again, by the way)

Products in the pipeline?

[JStyle]

Maybe HP already has printers with WebOS in the pipeline, a lot of them. Losing WebOS licenses at this point could be a major loss for their development group.

Re:Products in the pipeline?

[ProbablyJoe]

This seems likely. I remember when HP bought out Palm, they were talking about using WebOS in printers, and having integration between phones/tablets/printers/every device running WebOS. This made some amount of sense when there were devices to integrate with, but now they're basically giving up on WebOS in mobile devices, there's not much point.

Re:Products in the pipeline?

[JoeMerchant]

I imagine they have expanded WebOS for printers to interface to most other OSs, and this is what they don't want to lose, even if there are no WebOS devices that need to print anymore.

Re:Products in the pipeline?

[gander666]

As someone who manages a product with dedicated connectors for the various MFP devices (the big ones, in offices, not the $250 office depot specials), I for one HOPE there is a WebOS based change in the landscape.

All the vendors use shitty resistive touch screens, pissant code models, and have such a wide range of display size/capabilities that developing and testing are a nightmare.

I have long thought that an iOS based UI for a printer would be a humongous step forward. Likewise, a WebOS interface will be an enormous advantage.

Re:Products in the pipeline?

[gbjbaanb]

exactly the point - a single codebase will be much cheaper to maintain in the long term, and also allow additional network-connected features.

There's no reason why the $250 can't have these too, it should provide a value-add feature in usability that might help sell the printers.

Re:Products in the pipeline?

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful?

The question was why on Earth would they put WebOS on a printer. Wondering if they have several lined-up doesn't address the why.

Well, they already have this -

[certain death]

A Printer with an Android tablet built in. http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/12/hp-photosmart-estation-c510-printer-android-tablet-now-on-sale/ Maybe they want to change from Android to WebOS, or maybe they are just at step 3. - $$$ Profit

Well...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

On the bright side, absolutely anything would be better than the utter shit that passes for firmware in their present models.

I had the delightful experience just the other day of encountering an HP wireless laser printer(a comparatively low-volume one; but a full 'Hi, I'm a networked device on the network' sort of thing) that would simply hang and drop off the network until power-cycled if you attempted to print to it using the HP 'Universal' print driver...

So, not only was this thing such a piece of shit that it wasn't compatible with HP's own, supposedly, 'universal' driver(PCL motherfucker, do you speak it?); but HP's own UPD could be used as an attack toolkit for a DOS that could only be recovered by a hard power cycle.

Now, if HP actually believes that there is some kind of "People who want a non-ipad with a shittastic inkjet attached, for reasons unknown to normal humans" market, I'd be delighted to sell them a bridge. If their doomed effort to build WebOS printers at least means that their network-attached printers will be running a linux kernel that doesn't fall over and die at the first sign of malformed network input, I'll be a lot happier...

Re:Well...

[skids]

You ain't seen the half of it until you've been inside that firmware. I don't know what compiler they are using, but it produces total crap for machine code. We're talking entire giant switch statements that effectively do a NOOP.

Re:Well...

[omnichad]

I can only guess on that being for cropping photos direct from a memory card for printing. That's the ONLY demand I could think of.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking entire giant switch statements that effectively do a NOOP.

Chuck Testa?

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pah. I've always known that HP had utter crap for firmware. Last place I worked had an HP color laserjet which, when you tried to print a document with lots of images, would usually crash and require a hard reset. The fucking thing took at least 5 minutes to warm up, too.

The error code it listed, when the HP website was consulted, was something to the effect of "we don't know what the fuck went wrong, so you're basically screwed". The suggested tricks to remedy it (I shit you not) were along the lines of "re-scan all the images in the document, try printing again"... "re-compress the images in the document using lower JPEG quality or different format (GIF, TIFF), try printing again"... "reduce the file size of the print job, try printing again"... "copy-and-paste the entire document into a blank document, try printing again"... "use a different application, try printing again"... "nudge an image in the document slightly up/down/left/right, try printing again"... "add graphics to the document, try printing again"... holy fuck, it's like, are they really this clueless? Yes, they certainly were. Memory corruption? Bad escaping of binary data? Who the fuck knows... all I knew was it was a fucking pain in the ass when I was trying to get 50 copies of a color publication printed, collated, and stapled at 11 PM on Friday night and I needed them done by 8:00 Saturday morning.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually saw some of the HP firmware source a few years ago. I'm pretty sure that giant switch statement noop was in the original source, not just the compiler output.

Re:Well...

[Gilmoure]

CLJ2500 series? I remember when those first came out and were total dogs.

Re:Well...

[HBI]

I imagine the PCL interpreter on the printer shit the bed, this is why they were suggesting all these modifications to your document, hoping that the corner case would stop occurring if you altered the sequence of the PCL codes.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

well, here in my office we agree that HP printer software sucks big time; we have been real happy with the sharp network printer scanner xeroxer we got
However, hard as it may be to believe, on occaision Brother manages to give HP a run for their money in the worst printer software ever made

Interestingly, HP software problems extend to agilent, which is lab test equipment, and was spun out of HP several years ago
we use a very popular device in DNA labs, the agilent bioanalyzer.
The software is just excrutiating, with all the faults of the printer software magnified by the problem of fixing things with low unit volumes.

Re:Well...

[Dr_Barnowl]

Yeah, but a giant switch statement with no operations in it should be optimized out by any compiler worth it's salt.

Unless some peckerhead in management told the developers to turn off all optimization because he heard about optimization problems...

Re:Well...

[skids]

Unless some peckerhead in management told the developers to turn off all optimization because he heard about optimization problems

First genuine chuckle I've had all day.

Re:Well...

[petermgreen]

Or they turned off optimisation because the code didnt work properly with them turned on.

Hah.

[cswiii]

Especially funny considering my Touchpad could not natively (i.e., at all) be configured to print to the network-enabled printer on my home network. I suppose it's possible that a third-party driver would be needed, but one would think that a) they would try and package all possible driver downloads or b) would allow you to search the internet for them or c) allow user to upload driver manually, but none of those is apparently possible.

Ah well, I haven't booted into WebOS in weeks, anyway, and the new Cyanogen Alpha 3 is terrific.

Re:Hah.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If only HP had invented some sort of 'Printer Command Language' back in the 80s by which an embedded device might communicate with a great many of their printers(and a fair few 3rd party ones) with no platform-specific driver...

Re:Hah.

[SCHecklerX]

Read the forums. You need to:
1) enable snmp public read string on the printer. This is how the touchpad figures out it's a compatible printer
2) have a printer that can speak PCL

Re:Hah.

[jbolden]

Thank you. I was going to say that. Oh and BTW most HPs also have PDF. Some have Postscript and a few have IPDS.

Re:Hah.

[arth1]

2) have a printer that can speak PCL

But which flavour of PCL?

Remember that with PCL 6 (and 5e?), you no longer send PCL commands to a printer that then interprets it much like postscript, but you run a PCL compiler on the PC and send pre-compiled instructions which must be specific to the capabilities of the printer you print on - i.e. for anything except basic printing, you need bidirectional transfer to query the capabilities. Print A4 to certain PCL printers with letter paper, and watch them hang, because the logic isn't in the printer anymore.

Why? So the bean counters at HP could scale down the CPU and RAM in printers, because it's handled on the other side. Never mind that it breaks all compatibility with unidirectional protocols, and gobbles up more resources at the PC end.

Re:Hah.

[pseudonomous]

I would like to disagree with the moderation of your comment, it is *not* funny. It is $&#*ing tragic. There was a problem "every printer needs it's own #!*& driver", there were at least two solutions, postscript and PCL that date back to at least the 1980s. But, unless you've got something fancy enough to be considered a network printer, odds are that "the printer still needs it's own #!*& driver". Postscript printers were not-so-common in the 1980's because it was computationally expensive and microprocessors and RAM were not cheap back in the 1980's, but they *are* cheap now. So, let's recap:

1. 1) We had a problem
2. 2) We found a technical solution 30 years ago
3. 3) We still have the same problem, I have no idea why.

Re:Hah.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Don't worry, we will soon solve the problem with "Cloud Printing" or some such nonsense; because implementing a hardware RIP like they did on a 12MHz M68k with less than 2MB of RAM back in '85 is much more difficult than dragging half the internet into the problem...

What is even more annoying is that, even if implementing a full Postscript RIP in the printer hardware were too expensive, or too slow, the standardization of USB, and the various USB device classes, would have been a perfect time to introduce a reasonably sane USB printer class, for low-end printers, where they could declare their parameters(color/BW, available media sizes, resolution, etc) and receive fully crunched pixel data, in appropriate color depth, resolution, and size, from a software Postscript RIP on the host computer. That would still burden the host CPU; but host CPUs are damn fast, and you'd just need to target a single page description language. Instead, we got a USB Printer Device class that is basically a polite standardization of "how to send whatever horror your cheap shit requires over a USB cable"...

Re:Hah.

[WarlockD]

Lets be fair to the standardization community.. When the USB standard was coming out they wanted everything to be as backward compatible as possible as well as making devices very easily, well as easy as you can make USB devices.

A proper pinterdriver handles fonts, bitmaps, placement of objects, etc. I bet the driver spec would of been as big as the USB 1.1 spec itself.

Re:Hah.

[marcosdumay]

The printer uses bitmap anyway, why not standardize the bitmap interface so the OS could offer a default driver (the GP idea)? If you want a better driver, you can stll write one, and your printer will still be as cheap as it gets. Better yet, you can buy a driver from Adobe (as people automaticaly equate Adobe to print quality, that being true or not) that would work on with any printer.

If it comes bundled with the OS, the size of the driver is much less relevant.

Re:Hah.

[ggendel]

I got around this by using my server and putting three option statements in net-snmp to spoof a "supported" hp printer and then redirecting printer communication to my non-hp printer instead. Took all of 5 minutes. I've got 5 WebOS devices in my house that are heavily used. Curse you HP!

Re:Hah.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That's the theory: there is actually a lot to recommend doing the rasterization on the host side(the CPU power is likely to be crazy cheap by comparison, the odds of getting software updates and fixes are probably much better, you could even pull neat stunts like re-using existing platform libraries and specialized hardware(for instance, if you can use OpenGL commands to control a GPU and draw a bitmap onto your screen, there wouldn't be any major architectural impediment to having an OpenGL-based, GPU-accelerated, printer output, just by reading from the framebuffer into the hypothetical bitmap interface... You could also use traditional postscript RIPs, like Ghostscript or commercial alternatives, or basically anything else capable of rendering a bitmap output of a requested size and bit depth.

It isn't that rasterization is easy, or a good candidate for a USB spec(neither is true); but that rasterization is a problem that all platforms already have to solve(if they want to have a monitor), and the fact that there are various solutions is only an issue if the driver has to support that fact(as with the ghastly GDI-based 'winprinters' of ages past, which were utterly useless because there was no separation to allow for input from any other drawing mechanism). So long as the process for reporting the bitmap you want, receiving the bitmap you request, and doing basic paper/feed/supply related housekeeping is standardized, the rest will be quite complex(and likely nonstandard, or only standard per-platform); but will only need a thin layer to interact with any printer supporting the interface side of things.

Re:Hah.

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

People still have the problem because they continue to buy non-postscript printers. Luckily, it's easy to solve:

1. do not buy a non-postscript printer

2. buy a postscript printer

3. profit!

No Surprise: WebOS is HP's Best Option

[peterba]

HP wants a high quality touch interface for their printers and all other options are either too expensive (Microsoft), unavailable (iOS) or encumbered by patents issues and allow Google to data mine your clients (Android). WebOS is a good fit.

Re:No Surprise: WebOS is HP's Best Option

[Anonymous Coward]

> Google to data mine your clients (Android)

Right, because you can't have an Android OS tweaked for a different task or embedded (ADK?) into something which does not have to be networked device. It's okay to bash Google and Android without any valid points though, slashdot confirms it. Please continue.

Re:No Surprise: WebOS is HP's Best Option

[Anonymous Coward]

allow Google to data mine your clients (Android).

Are you fucking retarded? Google absolutely forbids any Google aps be bundled with Android unless you meet very specific requirements so HP would have to put in a lot of extra effort for Android to send any data to Google. Do you really think that Amazon, a much smaller company than HP ind you, would allow their customer data to go to Google? And furthermore, if you use any other mainstream mobile OS with the bundled browser/email/search, do you seriously believe you aren't being data-mined? Did you think your post through or didyou just see a cheap way to parrot a talking point and ake a potshot at Google and went for it?

fucking insightful my ass. I guess unadulterated FUD is what passes for insight around here these days.

Re:No Surprise: WebOS is HP's Best Option

[jbolden]

There are a huge number of touch interfaces. Blackberry has 2: BBOS and QNX (QNX is excellent for a hardware device). JavaVM, BREW...

WebOS is a good choice I agree with you there. But there is nothing particularly special about it.

Re:No Surprise: WebOS is HP's Best Option

[oakgrove]

If Android inherently allows "Google to spy on your customers", how do you explain Amazon's use of it on the Kindle Fire? Do you really believe that if Android did what you accuse it of, Amazon would use it? Do you think you are smarter than Amazon or know something they don't?

Re:No Surprise: WebOS is HP's Best Option

[gl4ss]

or they could just pick an industry mag from 8 years ago and go with any toolkit they want and just code it to look like they want.

and they already make an android printer.. (dunno if it's g licensed with market etc tho, there's no need really).

Re:No Surprise: WebOS is HP's Best Option

[Locutus]

haven't they been using their own Chai( JVM clean room implementation ) in their higher end printers for some time now? My guess is that having something like WebOS on their printers would give them a nice jump up to to somewhat modern times/software since they've been the only ones working with/on Chai for its lifetime.

history: HP had Chai and a 100% Java PIM platform on a Linux kernel running on one of their Jornada handhelds. When it was time to market it the project was shuttered because if they shipped it, they'd lose all the profits they got from Microsoft Marketing Programs. ie Microsoft was paying HP to ship WindowsCE on their handhelds and the loss of that was greater than the potential profits from doing their own Linux/JVM based platform. This was around the 2000 or 2001 timeframe. Chai ended up in lots of their printers and that was about it.

LoB

Eh....

[King_TJ]

Sounds to me like HP is simply misled, once again. They've probably been developing a lot of fancy stuff for their Deskjet printers on the webOS platform and don't want to throw all of their work away. Unfortunately, HP doesn't seem to get that most of us are moving AWAY from the idea of printing on paper, wherever possible.

Sure, there are times when it's convenient or even necessary to print something out - but ANY respectable printer attached to your computer can do that. HP has been trying to sell printers with built-in LCD displays that connect directly to the Internet and allow all sorts of interaction with websites without any host system even being attached first. When you get over the initial "cool factor" that your printer can, say, print up your airline flight schedule right from its front panel? You realize this is just a gimmick to encourage you to use as much HP ink as possible. (If you looked the same thing up on your computer, you might simply read it on the screen, or even print only a selected part that didn't use as much paper or ink.)

Honestly, the one thing I'd like to see HP do with their "all in one" line of printers is create more reliable, less bloated drivers for them! If webOS somehow helps them accomplish that task, it would be worth it (but I'm really not thinking that's the goal for it). Just the other day, my boss spent hours on the phone with tech support at HP, all because of their drivers making a confused mess out of things when you own several of their products and move your laptop between them regularly. (He had an older 7600 at his house which became his wife's main printer downstairs. Then he bought a new 8500 Pro model to use upstairs via their wireless network. He bought a second 8500 Pro for his vacation home. Practically every time he travels between his vacation home and regular house, something winds up getting screwed up so the "HP Director" software decides he can only select his 7600 for scanning, or one/both of the 8500's decide to stop taking any print jobs, or ??)

Re:Eh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, the one thing I'd like to see HP do with their "all in one" line of printers is create more reliable, less bloated drivers for them!

They should hire Oracle to do that. The same motherfucker who writes the Oracle Universal Installer. HP Universal Printer Driver Universal Installer. That's going to rock.

Re:Eh....

[Chrisq]

Unfortunately, HP doesn't seem to get that most of us are moving AWAY from the idea of printing on paper, wherever possible.

Please tell my bosses! One has a secretary print out emails for him to read. Another looked at me as though I was mad when I suggested having an intranet application for expenses claims instead of a paper form. And they both come into work carrying a real newspaper.

Re:Eh....

[PPH]

You must work for Boeing.

We had a 'paper saving initiative' many years ago. The unit chief figured it was so important that rather than circulating one memo on the topic per group with a routing slip attached, he ordered one copy made for each employee (several hundred) in his organization.

Re:Eh....

[jbolden]

Unfortunately, HP doesn't seem to get that most of us are moving AWAY from the idea of printing on paper, wherever possible.

That's been the meme for a generation. At the same time average number of impressions printed by computers skyrocketed all through to about 2000 and continues to be very high still. Today a $5000 workgroup printers is capable of doing duty cycles in range of 50k-100k impressions between servicing on average, reliability you used to have to be in the $250k range to get. While the workgroup printers still don't have all the features of the centralized print system, they are driving up not down print volumes.

Re:Eh....

[petermgreen]

The whole printer drivers system really seems like a relic of a bygone era at least for network printers. Why should I have to install a special driver just on every machine (an action that requires admin privileges) just to be able to send print jobs to a printer?

Also while I don't personally like relying on cloud based services I can see that for normal users having a destination in the cloud they can send their print jobs to when away from home is rather useful. Like it or not most peoples networks are behind NAT or stateful fir walling so just accepting print jobs direct from the internet is not really practical.

Re:Eh....

[Gilmoure]

My workplace seems to be moving away from printers. Anecdotal: just moved offices and all files fit in one box and that's after 6 years in original office. All our training, HR stuff, etc is all online now.

'Course, everyone's picking up iPads so wonder what the footprint of those devices are vs printers/paper/toner.

Re:Eh....

[jbolden]

I get it. There are moves online. At the same time the ease of printing changes things.

And the iPads are cheaper. Don't forget you have smaller offices without paper and thus less heating and air conditioning.

Re:Eh....

[rdnetto]

Sounds to me like HP is simply misled, once again. They've probably been developing a lot of fancy stuff for their Deskjet printers on the webOS platform and don't want to throw all of their work away. Unfortunately, HP doesn't seem to get that most of us are moving AWAY from the idea of printing on paper, wherever possible.

Or maybe they're recognizing this. Think about it. The obvious replacement for paper (if you're just viewing something) is a tablet. And HP has designed to integrate a tablet into a printer, which would (likely) allow you to view documents that had been 'printed'.

Yes, it's nothing we can't do now with CutePDF, etc. But the average consumer wants a simple, one-click process and something like this has the potential for that.

I guess they don't have these in America:

[Kagetsuki]

http://www.epson.jp/products/colorio/printer/me/
Printers with screens and keyboards and built in software to print photos, greeting cards, calendars, and quite a few other things. WebOS would be perfect for one of these and I'd bet that's exactly what they want to do with it.

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[Rude Turnip]

No, we don't. That looks like something that would be marketed toward the geriatric sector though.

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[flimflammer]

Indeed, no we don't have anything like that. The closest thing I've seen have tiny 320x240 screens and some of them are touch capable, which are merely for options.

WebOS would probably be a good fit for something like that but a bit unnecessarily advanced. I guess if they already have the tech though why not use it.

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[microcars]

We have those, albeit a bit larger and they are at Walgreens, CVS and SAMS Club...

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[Kagetsuki]

It is! And they sell fairly well actually.

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[Kagetsuki]

Well with WebOS they'd have a solid API they could use for generations of printers without a lot of porting and compatibility issues. In fact they are already trying to come out with "Print Apps", I'm sure they'd like to have those on the printer itself: http://h50146.www5.hp.com/products/printers/inkjet/print_apps/ Add to that the ability to update the software and probably a variety of wireless integration features and you have what would basically be an all in one printing solution for people who can't deal with a computer (and in Japan there are a LOT of old people).

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[garyebickford]

Heck, today even the coffee maker in our lunchroom has a small color touchscreen display - it even has an idle-mode slideshow of coffee beans.

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[sapgau]

I've had less issues with Epson printers than HP.
They are simpler and easier to use too.
I'm moving away from ink cartridges and into laser printing. Epson should have great products for that.

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[lightbox32]

I used to have a printer with a built-in keyboard. It was called a typewriter.

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[Kagetsuki]

I got an all-in-one HP inkjet about 2 years ago that's been a nightmare. The ink dries out in a matter of days and even new full cartridges will barely print 10 full color pages - which brings a page cost to something like Y360 or about $4 US for a full color A4 photo-quality print. Even economy mode is terrible. I've actually had to drill out holes in the top which I unseal before I print and saturate the cartridges with a little water and generic-economy ink. It's held me over for a while now and brought printing cost down significantly, but it's still a stupid kludge on inferior technology.

So I'm with sapgau on that one, next printer I buy will probably be an economy Epson color laser.

Re:I guess they don't have these in America:

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like it is directed at the spendthrift 'new mom' crowd that think it is a duty to spend extravagantly when they have their first baby.

WebOS name in spanish

[Anonymous Coward]

This is no surprizing: WebOS means "eggs" in Spanish, and not the ones that you keep in the fridge.

Re:WebOS name in spanish

[omnichad]

You mean huevos? Yes, you do pronounce the spanish word for eggs much like you could possibly pronounce WebOS. Doesn't make sense to me, though, how huevos also became synonymous with any male parts - Biology 101 says girls make eggs. I can assure you that if I make huevos rancheros that they are made with chicken eggs.

Re:WebOS name in spanish

[Doc Ruby]

Men's "balls" look more like eggs than they look like balls. Don't you have any to check?

Re:WebOS name in spanish

[omnichad]

What's your point? I don't refer to them as "balls" either.

Re:WebOS name in spanish

[sapgau]

Well in Mexico we say:
"No me rompas los huevos" (don't break my balls)
And dealing with HP printers seems appropriate!!

Re:WebOS name in spanish

[omnichad]

Yeah - I know that it's common usage, it just seems weird to me and just strange that a technically very female word was used in such a way. But I don't pronounce WebOS like that. Oh Ess, not ohs. Maybe I'm different.

Re:WebOS name in spanish

[Shatrat]

But if you make Heuvos del Toro, you're cooking bull balls. It's not synonymous, it is the onyma itself.

Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[stanlyb]

Right, there is a very big business behind network printers, or the ability to print anything, from anywhere, to anywhere, even from your mobile phone. If you think this is not a big deal, think again, and look around, and actually try to do it. And then try to think how could you do it in corporate environment. Still no idea how to make it work? And work transparently? Don't worry, there is still no universal solution out there. Now, pick any bank, or any organizations with many branches all around the world, and keeping in mind that there is still not good enough solution, you could imagine how much money are there, and what an advantage you could have if you do it properly.

Re:Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[jbolden]

In a corporate environment? I'll tell you how to do it.

You run a printer job distribution server, like IBM PSF, FlexServer and Solimar. Mobile jobs are tagged by type and location, with options for user preferences to that system which dispatches globally to local printer servers / inner office mail. It could also connect to 3rd party providers like Kinko's for remote pickup. End users are then sent a job ticket via. email.

I built that sort of thing 15 years ago. The reason it doesn't work well at home is no-one has figured out how to setup distribution without a system admin sitting down and writing lots of complex rules. But for enterprise that's just rolled into deployment cost.

Re:Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[gl4ss]

advantage for consumer is not an advantage for the companies involved here. they already made several okay protocols for universal printing. just email a pdf and have it printed, that's been done already, as a lot less cumbersome protocols for the same thing.

Re:Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[Doc Ruby]

I'd put Android on the printers. Java is the most cross-platform execution environment, and the Android OS is built on that principle. It especially matches the Android that runs most mobile phones (and other mobile devices) from which most individual printing will be done over the next years.

Android is rising as WebOS has fallen. Why would you pick a loser instead of the clear winner that's technically better for you? Oh, right: HP.

Re:Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[stanlyb]

What if i dont wanna to email the job, but actually.....what, print? Like hitting the "Print" button, and voila, it is printed. Would not be amazing to have such a feature?

Re:Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[stanlyb]

It is not about Android or iPhone or WP7, it is about having cloud environment, in which having the printer print to/from anywhere is just a feature, not an issue, requiring 3rd part software. And just for the record, Android does not have it, nor iPhone.

Re:Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[stanlyb]

You actually pointed out why HP wanna their webOs so desperately. Imagine the cost benefits any organization would have, if HP provides them with such an easy to configure and use feature...Did i hear a lot of money changing bits and bytes?

Re:Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[gbjbaanb]

You could do what my Epson workforce pro does - it's wireless built-in, so once you've got it connected to the network, you can just put whereever there's a power socket.

There's a print-via-email webservice they have, you email your document to a special email address and the (internet-allowed) printer will fetch the document and print it for you. (no, I don't know if it polls regularly or gets a notification sent to a web service running on the printer).

There's an android app to print your pictures (but not pdfs yet) directly from your phone or your dropbox/evernote/etc service.

So no there's no universal solution that does everything, but we're getting closer.

Re:Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[jbolden]

Not quite.

For a company with a private network the cost of having print jobs (which can be easily be 100MB / page if ripped on the host) flowing through the network, especially things like private cell data network is terrible. You want the control those other systems provide. The other real problem is cost per impression. I don't want 10,000 page print jobs for a meeting going to the $.04 per page departmental level printer rather than the $.003 per page offsite printer or worse the $.14 per page printer in the office. Besides setup right, even the end users are amazed how well these systems work. Who would want to downgrade from PFS or Solimar to WebOS? If I have a 7000 person company with 3 main locations and a few dozen small offices, with all sorts of telecommunicating, with VPN, private cloud, MPLS,.... I want the control, assuming the company still has a good IT department.

But... where it really makes sense is the step down from that. The 50-1000 employee business. They may not be using a private network yet, and something like Verizon FIOS is passing the data. They don't have a server setup in each location.... And of course all that stuff I mentioned not being in place, kills the good solution. American business is heavily focused on doing stuff badly and easily right now, WebOS works well for that.

I loved my WebOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved WebOS, but the party's over. HP, you should have thought of this crap when you axed the Pre3 and Touchpad.

And thus Skynet was born....

[Bl4d3]

I better start building that shelter now with all of the punishment I've done to printers over the years (better freaking hope no one ever make a dial up modem tablet)

Someday I'm gonna weasel my way into the boardroom

[james_van]

and take over a company. Not out of greed or a need for power, but to prove a point - that I can run a company at least as well as an "executive". Day after day we hear about absolutely moronic decisions like this being made, and we listen to suits blither on and on about vision and direction (while it's glaringly obvious that they are completely out of touch with reality) and I really, honestly believe that I could walk in and at the very least not do any worse than them. Maybe it's cause I've spent my whole life at the bottom with the rest of the unwashed masses and I still (so naively) believe that a company who listens to its customers (and good common sense) can be more successful that a company who caters to its shareholders whims, maybe I'm just an idiot. But someday, mark my words, I'm gonna weasel my way into a CEO spot and I'm gonna try my damnedest to do something smart! And then I'm gonna get promptly fired and go back to my cubicle and write PHP.

Occam's razor

[Thud457]

Maybe there's something about webOS and printers that HP knows and the rest of the world doesn't."

Or maybe HP mismanagment is so technologically clueless that they fundamentally misunderstand what webOS is.
My bet's on the latter.

Makes sense for some printers.

[dreemernj]

The typical full size copier in an office has a computer running on it. The last office I worked in had 2 copiers with Celeron based computers with 512mb RAM and 80gb harddrives in them. I don't know what OS they ran. Perhaps, for that sort of application having a solid OS that runs on cheaper hardware could be a valuable asset.

Deja Vu

[ggendel]

Shades of the 80s! Canon Research created a great little c-like interpreted language called ici. It had all sorts of nifty lisp like features and had a nice API for native extensions. They expected to put it in all of their products (including printers) and even open-sourced it. Outside of a few external projects that I and others had, I don't think it went anywhere.

HP drivers are terrible

[__aazsst3756]

HP makes great hardware on the large format printer segment (24", 36" + rolls). I know of one engineering firm that switched brands specifically because HP drivers were so bad they got tired of jumping through hoops to get what they wanted on paper.

For example tell a KIP to print a 24" x 36" page, and you get one. Exactly. Tell HP to do the same and you will likely get something 1/4" off in both directions. That forced them to pull tricks like printing barely visible lines at the right place in the margin to fool the printer. One of their offices gave up and made huge margins on all of their pages.

It became much easier to just switch brands and not fight the driver, even though they likely had best of class hardware.

Re:HP drivers are terrible

[jbolden]

You had a roll printer that could not print to the edge of the page? What model?

Re:HP drivers are terrible

[Anonymous Coward]

As an engineering shop we went from wide format HP to Canon, and our print issues disappeared. Interestingly enough, though I knew the HP repair guy fairly good, I have no clue who repairs Canon's as it has never needed maintenance for the 4 - 5 years we've had it.

Re:HP drivers are terrible

[jimicus]

Software vendors cannot make good hardware. It's some sort of physical law, shortly after "Conservation of Energy" in the Junior Colour Encyclopaedia of Science.

Hardware vendors cannot make good software. For much the same reason.

Where you run into trouble is when a hardware vendor decides for reasons best known only to themselves "You know what would be really good? If we could bundle a bit more logic into the software...."

Cut the "VentureBeat" crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

VentureBeat itself has no credibility whatsoever. Naming proper sources would at least make it possible that those sources would be trustworthy. This way we have to trust them.
Yeah... riiight.... Next I'll ask OJ what happened back then, and Bush about the existence of Iraqi WMDs.

Re:Cut the "VentureBeat" crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong thread man

or maybe the Yes men...

[Thud457]

LSD in the water in the board room.

Now that would be LULZY. Come on OWS!

deja vu, all over again..

[greywire]

I think HP is trying to replicate the success that Palm previously enjoyed when it split into Palm One and Palmsource - one company for hardware and one company for the software.

HP doesn't want to get beat by Apple again

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously they saw this report (I'm Thinking Printers) and realized they needed to not get left behind by the rapidly-evolving market.

Why Not Android?

[Doc Ruby]

Seems to me that a small, performant JVM embedded OS would be perfect for the highly diverse, low powered devices that are HP printers. Even the Java feature of network-mobile objects, that execute the same code in different ways to exploit the different local HW, seems better for printers than for most other kinds of devices. Android is an OS that HP wouldn't have to pay (much) to produce or maintain, so HP could focus on HW instead of the SW dev that it's never been good at. Why would it want anything but Android?

Only to maintain total control of the SW. But what benefit is that to HP, compared to the benefits of using Android instead?

Re:Why Not Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Not Zoidberg?

FTFY

Re:Someday I'm gonna weasel my way into the boardr

[Doc Ruby]

But you're not friends with lots of other CEOs. That, my friend, is the primary - and often only - qualification to be CEO. Otherwise how would they keep all the benefits for themselves, and push the fallout from their bad execution down to everyone else?

Class. Great taste, less filling.

If HP took a page from the Jobs play book...

[Anonymous Coward]

Web OS would be the "hub" for HP.

Web OS Tablets would be paperless printers that your PC and even your all in one scanner/printer could send documents to.

Small multi-touch Web OS screens, about the size of a smart phone, would be the advanced control for more complex printers.
HP would expand printer innovation to make 3D printers for plastics, metal, etc and they would be cheap enough for any engineering shop to purchase for quick prototyping. HP would also introduce circuit board printers for quick prototyping of electronics. These more complex printers will all require Web OS based multi-touch interfaces to make them usable.

Of course you could use your Web OS tablet to control these complex printers remotely via WiFi. Web OS tablets would need to run CAD Apps and circuit design Apps, but to do real number crunching these tablets would auto-magically tap into the power of your HP workstation or PC via WiFi.

I wonder if HP is beleaguered enough yet to innovate?

Re:If HP took a page from the Jobs play book...

[Grishnakh]

It's not possible for HP to innovate, no matter how beleaguered they are, because of the morons they keep picking to run the place. Apple was able to do it because Jobs 1) was an engineer, at least by degree IIRC, though obviously he let Woz and later others do the hard engineering, but at least he had enough background to understand things unlike a moron like Meg Whitman, 2) Jobs actually had half a brain, again unlike the morons at HP, and 3) (this is probably the biggest factor) Jobs wasn't in it to get rich, he had some crazy idea about making what he thought were great products and getting everyone to buy them. Of course, we can debate how great his products really were (or how freedom-friendly etc.), but this again is a far cry from the typical CEO of today who doesn't give two shits about his company's products, and only cares about his golden parachute. Note that this isn't to make Jobs out to be some wonderful person, it's just that the people running most American companies these days are so utterly horrible, and don't even care about making good products (because next-quarter profits are more important), that it was really pretty easy for Jobs to achieve the success he did by having totally different tactics.

3d printers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they think 3D printers eventually will make it to all households.
Then we would all 'need' printers and not smartphones/tablets.

Been crap for years

[dbIII]

There's some HP Jetdirect devices that get bricked by the default nmap TCP/IP portscan. Replacements still cost insane prices on the secondhand market.

Re:Been crap for years

[Grishnakh]

Really? Which ones? I hope the 610N / j3113a isn't on that list

Re:Been crap for years

[dbIII]

Really? Which ones?

Horrible little overpriced network to parallel port Jetdirect devices in an external case. They are only necessary due to crappy HP drivers that make it even worse to run directly from a PC and no linux support at all on some printers. Yes, it's for an old printer, but when you get a 42" inkjet plotter you want to use it until it falls apart.
Some other things with related hardware may die from a portscan so I've been careful with HP gear ever since. It's not only HP that is crap, some Samsung VoIP phones crash from a portscan but they come back OK after being unplugged, which is a bit better than having to buy another one.

Stealth mesh?

[alispguru]

HP wants to deploy a stealth wireless network around the world, so they secretly put an entire OS in each of their printers.

The printers mesh-network with each other, and the ones that have a real internetwork connection do the backhaul.

Think about it - how often have you looked for a wifi connection in the middle of nowhere, and all you could see was some poor lonely HP printer looking for some peer-to-peer action...

Jumped the shark ...

[gstoddart]

HP seems to have long ago jumped the shark.

They went from making really good stuff that was used in business (laser printers, HP-UX and my old HP-9000 workstations) to absolute crap that isn't even usable at a consumer level.

I think we've thrown out 2 HP printers at home in the last few years because they just didn't last -- well, that and it cost less to replace than to buy new toner for it.

Not sure if they'll turn around or not, but I've viewed HP as making products I'm not willing to gamble on for a while ... their management has turned over so many times as to make it fairly clear HP as a company has no idea of what it's got on the go.

And then there's whatever the hell they're doing with their web servers ... good luck finding and retaining anything on their sites. By the time it gets obfuscated into something like "http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/siteHome?cc=us&lc=en", you'll never successfully bookmark anything of use, and probably never find it again.

HP is a company that used to be a tech giant, but which is failing quickly. Maybe some of their divisions are still doing good things ... but I wouldn't spend my own money on an HP product.

Re:Someday I'm gonna weasel my way into the boardr

[james_van]

guess ill have to start making friends. damn.

WebOS Printer Support

[TerminaMorte]

On the touchpad, one of the big selling points was the ability to print to HP printers.

Of course, most HP printers didn't work. Like my LaserJet 1018. Or Color Laserjet 4600.

Come to think of it, never got a single printer working with it. There's a reason HP's profits are down 90%.

Is it so hard to have an ARM version of CUPS that can print to everything?

Re:WebOS Printer Support

[ggendel]

See my comments above on how to spoof a supported hp printer for your non-supported one. More information on the "print to any printer" thread found on http://forums.precentral.net/

WebOS should be an embedded device OS

[Anonymous Coward]

As I told a coworker a while back HP should just make WebOS an embedded device OS and apparently that's what some internal developers did for their printers. HP could actually turn WebOS into a product this way if they had the imagination.

HP's new slogan

[slapout]

HP: Whatever the correct decision is, we do the opposite.

HP makes more than desk top printers

[bashibazouk]

Keep in mind HP makes good large format inkjet and latex printers (of the 36" to 96" roll paper variety). The old 5000/5500 design jet series were warhorses. They generally have many more options than your desk top printer, and you use many of those options during production. The 5000/5500 series had a horrible interface. The newer 6100z and latex printers have not expanded much on that. I could see using WebOS would improve these printers greatly.

Re:HP makes more than desk top printers

[Forbman]

What's a "latex printer"?

Re:HP makes more than desk top printers

[bashibazouk]

Prints with a latex based ink. It's a bit less toxic than some other inks and has a 30% flex once dry. Also has good outdoor durability and a decent color gamut compared to other UV resistant outdoor inks. It's used for vehicle wrap graphics and other outdoor applications.

Re:Someday I'm gonna weasel my way into the boardr

[517714]

Push is not required, shit rolls downhill.

For control?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just skimmed a bunch of recent comments, and no one mentioned the obvious: here at work, I pull up their embedded web pages on the printers, to check or set things remotely. Perhaps - I know nothing about WebOS other than the name - they want something smaller than the o/s + webserver they're already running.

                mark

Generic drivers suck

[Radical Moderate]

Sorry, but in a production environment a generic driver doesn't cut it. Maybe if all you print is 8.5x11 on plain paper, but if you're doing photos, tabloid, transparencies, duplexing, you need a real driver. Unfortunately, HP no longer makes real drivers. I'm hoping they can't do worse than the universal driver, but considering all the stupid crap HP has done recently I wouldn't bet on it.

Re:Generic drivers suck

[jbolden]

A production environment? In a production environment end users (I'm assuming graphic designers) shouldn't be printing at all. They should be sending their jobs to an EJS team working on professional equipment. Content creators are not experts in rendering.

And HP doesn't make production quality equipment anymore. As for the rest, they are supported by generic postscript drivers.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

HP firmware, oh the humanity.....

[Radical Moderate]

We just had to downgrade the firmware on some our printers because the newest version wouldn't duplex correctly. How the hell does a printer company release firmware that breaks duplexing? Is anybody home at HP?

And you don't want to know how much fun it was to actually find the old firmware on HP's site.

UI

[robi2106]

Yes, HP's UI panel sucks on virtually all its printers. It would be vastly improved by using a webOS based display. If nothing else, it wouldnt' be ay worse.

Or not

[DrYak]

I have long thought that an iOS based UI for a printer would be a humongous step forward. Likewise, a WebOS interface will be an enormous advantage

Not sure. The single best advantage WebOS is known for and appreciated, is that its "stack of cards" metaphor makes multitasking on a small smartphone screen damn easy.

On the other hand, a printer normally does only one single thing: printing. You don't need to run 3 or more applications in parallel and easily track them all on a printer.

The only thing that distinguish WebOS from other solutions (Adroid, or Licensing iOS from Apple if that's possible) is useless for a printer.

Re:Or not

[gander666]

If they were "only" printers, then I could see your point. But the office class, multi function devices that are printers, copiers, and scanners, often running additional applications like cost recovery, fax server connections, document ingestion into content management solutions etc. These devices would greatly be helped by a multitasking, card based UI and some clean design guidelines.

The HP Went

[DragonHawk]

The problem is that those printers are expensive, but then again, so were the "Good ol' days" printers they replaced.

For more than a decade, I bought nothing but HP printers. That changed a few years ago, when they started to suck hard (huge bloated software, poor quality control, non-existent tech support; refusal to honor warranties).

A few months ago, we needed a new plotter/wide format printer. HP was pretty much the only option for what we needed. So:

We buy a brand new DesignJet T790. $4500 wide-format printer.

The control panel UI is slow and often doesn't respond to finger presses. It does, however, have lots of high color graphics and animations. I'm pretty sure it's WebOS. Certainly feels like a smart phone.

Web UI has two different credential schemes depending on what page you're on. Some pages want you to leave the username field blank; other pages want you to use "admin" for the username.

Out-of-the-box, the unit won't load paper. Seems like it's not actually trying to feed. After trying to a bit, it says "Edge of roll not found". Prompts me to lift the lever and unload paper. I lift the lever. New message: "Lever unexpectedly lifted". Lather, rinse, repeat.

Support guidance says load the latest firmware.

Look for firmware. It's not under "Download drivers and software". Eventually find it under a howto section.

  309 MB file! Get download started.

Since I'm downloading, decide to grab drivers. Check under "Download drivers and software". Don't see drivers. Mainly just this "HP ePrint and Share: Easy printing" thing. That claims to be a radical new technology that lets me print without drivers or software. To use it, all I have to do is download and install this software. Umm...

Eventually find drivers under some other howto page.

Firmware download finished. It's just a binary blob, no checksum info, no wrapper like ZIP or anything. I just have to hope for the best. Takes several minutes to load. The machine hung during loading; I had to power-cycle it. Fortunately it came back up. Loads paper now, even.

The old HP is dead. The current management is just feeding off the corpse.

Re:The HP Went

[jbolden]

HP seems to say it follows industry norms. (HP-GL/2, HP-RTL, TIFF, JPEG, CALS G4, HP PCL 3 GUI)

They have a list of supported linuxes: http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/models/designjet/hp_designjet_t790ps_44in.html
They even provide source code for a compatible driver: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/hplip/hplip-3.11.10.tar.gz

I've never personally played with it. But it seems to do fine for generic print. That being said it is "plug and play" so it is doing all sorts of stuff a printer shouldn't. Turn that crap off.

The OS is needed because the printer supports direct print from USB drives.

HP print driver quality

[klubar]

I pretty much have to say that I've stopped buying HP printers based on the lousy drivers they supply. The drivers are huge, badly designed and incredibly slow. Even worse I don't want my printer driver popping up in the corner with "special offers" (marketing speak for ads). It's a printer drivers. It's really too bad because back in the good old days, HP made really good printers. (We still have some 10+ year old laserjets in use.) I can't speak to the current quality of HP devices, but I suspect that they have gone downhill.

My current favorite for moderately priced b&w laser printers is Xerox. The drivers don't suck too badly and the hardware quality is pretty good. And they offer true postscript.

End of HP, from the hostility here

[Anonymous Coward]

HP should be more concerned that at the very mention of their name, it invokes so much hostility from tech people that have spend years fighting with their screwed up way of doing biz. Not even sure MS does that on ./, but that we have all wasted too much of our life fighting with broken HP hardware and drivers, well...not encouraged to buy any stock soon.

Sadly, I still have to buy their frigen hardware because the drivers seem to suck the least of the printer makers.

Their Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

They were talking about getting rid of their PC business, they got rid of their tablet business... what major consumer device category does that leave? Printers.

I recently bought an HP scanner/printer with a "touchscreen" (in the sense that you can touch four buttons on the screen) because it was on clearance and I needed a cheap one for a satellite office. Setting it up was eye-opening. Aside from the horrible user experience in general (I have to install an operating system on my $49 printer? Couldn't the factory have handled that? Why the heck can't I just plug it in and turn it on? My computers already have HP printer drivers pre-installed!), I was amazed that it required me to CONNECT IT (the printer!) to the Internet before it would print a test page. And the test page was primarily a full-color ad for a bunch of BS services I would never want from HP and no one should... why on Earth would I want it to print pages from the Internet every morning for me when I can read them on my other devices... does HP envision itself "delivering" the physical newspaper to my desk every morning. I got the impression that some antiquated executive was nodding off in a meeting one day and happened to hear his team mention that they were putting Wi-Fi in the new printers, and he half-sleepily voiced a long-held dream: "I want my newspaper waiting on my desk when I get in. Can the printer do that for me if it has Wi-Fi? That would be a game-changing, industry-shaping innovation. Go! Invent!" And then he fell asleep again. Then he woke up and had another thought: "I don't like computers because they're confusing. I want to print photos from the internet without having to mess around with a computer. Make it do that. Invent!"

I thought I was buying a cheap printer -- what I got was a marketing vehicle designed to deliver ads to be delivered to me at my expense and attempt to get me hooked into their ridiculous services. They obviously feel that the only way they can survive is to make you connect to the internet for their services through the device you bought from them. HP has decided the printer is the computer, and they are wrong. The new Steve Jobs biography mentions that the day Jobs resigned as CEO, everyone seemed excited that HP was exiting the tablet business, but Jobs was depressed by this. The last thing he did before leaving was talk about how sad he was to see what had happened to HP. The founders thought they left the company in good hands, and they were wrong. He said he hoped that didn't happen to Apple, and left the room.

They need to put an OS on their printers...

[Fned]

...so that they can install anti-virus software on them.

Something they know that we dont?

[nurb432]

Like what variety of mushrooms they are smoking?

How about a printer that just takes data and prints it... No special drivers, nothing.. send it a Postscript file and it prints.

Why bother?

[Hillgiant]

They already run netBSD.

Single action at a time

[DrYak]

Yes, multi function printers can do a lot of at the same time.
But usually an user is using only one function at a time.

Most of the other function you mention (cost tracking & accounting ; fax routing ; etc.) are more like deamon running in the background than application you have to track in parallel. (The fax router is working alone in its corner. Once you have hit the "send fax" button, you don't need to think of it anymore)

MFP *can do* lots of stuff. But 99% of the workflow is sequential from the point of view of the user. (You scan a document, then you upload it onto the office repository, then again from the same menu you make a fax of it). There's no need to track several tasks simultaneously, unlike a smartphone, where you can simultaneously have a chat/sms/messaging app, email, a music player, and several info gathering apps (feed reader, weather and other news apps, etc.).

That's what I meant. Using a print center is usually a linear sequence A, B, C, D, then perhaps back to C, and D2. WebOS if good when all this letters are separate apps that are tracked in parallel and between which you need to constantly switch.