HP Tries Desperately To Make ‘Printer As A Subscription’ A Thing
When last we checked in with Hewlett Packard (HP), the companyhad just been sued(for the second time) for crippling customer printers if owners attempt to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. It was just the latest in a long saga where printer manufacturers use DRM or dodgy software updates to wage all out war on consumer choice.
There hasn't been a whole lot of introspection going on at the company since. Shortly after the lawsuit HP CEO Enrique Loreswent on CNBCto double down on the company's position. First by making up claims that HP has to be obnoxious about cartridges to protect consumer security (false), then by basically stating that any consumer who intelligently shops for cartridges is a bad investment."
This week HP unveiled its latest plan on this track: printing as a service. The company's new All-In Plan" requires that you pay anywhere from $7 a month to $36 a month to rent a printer with a set printable page limit. During your rental, HP sends you, of course, their ink cartridges.
As Ars Technica notes, the printer must remain connected to the internet for monitoring. And the company's privacy policy effectively gives HP full control over, well, everything:
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.."
And of course the subscription comes with long term contracts and early termination fees should you not subscribe for the full two-year term. All told, the tone-deafness is fairly stunning.
Paying for the same several-hundred dollar printer for all eternity is precisely the sort of concept Lores has been pushing for a while. The problem is it's not clear that anybody actually wants this. It's also not really clear that paying up to $36 for a printer you never really own makes much value sense. Printers inherently aren't that expensive. And ink isn't either, if companies aren't being restrictive tyrants.
For HP, none of that matters. Lores isn't thinking about building quality products or building solid relationships. He's thinking exclusively of finding creative ways to goose profits and deliver Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost. You can't do that by simply providing users a quality, affordable product people like; you inevitably have to start cutting corners and nickel-and-diming users.
Once they've established renting a printer as a norm, they'll just steadily jack the rental price skyward as they make the underlying value proposition steadily worse. Ultimately the business becomes less and less about making popular quality products, and more and more about making unnecessarily convoluted subscriptions with creative restrictions and ever-skyrocketing monthly prices.