So I’m in Costco shopping for ink cartridges for my old HP 5550 inkjet and I discover that buying a brand new wireless HP inkjet costs only $20 more than buying the cartridges. So I buy me a new printer.
Setting it up was easy. Installing the printer software was… educational. As in, what could possibly be in a printer driver and printer interface software package that would require 650 megabytes of storage space??? But wait, there’s more: you can also install the automatic update utility, which uses a mere 700 megabytes! That’s right, folks, the disk footprint of my new HP inkjet printer is noticeably larger than the footprint for the Microsoft Office suite :).
They say that Microsoft is the King of Bloated Code? Not any more. Meet the new king, HP’s printer division!
Oh, and to top things off, the HP installer reset my default printer to the new inkjet…without asking permission. That’s a serious no-no in user interface design.
Ah, HP! What’s happened to you? Methinks your ratio of engineers to marketers has shifted towards the latter…and it’s not an improvement :).