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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."
Maybe they finally realized that the "HP Universal Print Driver" is neither Universal nor a Print Driver.
Discuss...
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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...
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.
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
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
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...
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.
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.
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 ??)
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.
That would certainly explain the price of toner.
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.
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.
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)
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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.
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.
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?
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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).
HP: Whatever the correct decision is, we do the opposite.
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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.
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.
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.