And the same happened with Vista. I smell class action and rightly so.

I had quite an opposite experience with the HP phone support. Our office printer was sent broken, out of the box. Technical support told me they would exchange it. Fine so far.I am being transferred me to the sales department, who transfers me to the “Color OfficeJet” team but instead I get transferred to the wrong place. With each transfer, I have to provide my name, product number, s/n just to be told that I am to be transferred again.Even just giving my name is made a painful burden: I have to spell it since the audio quality is terrible and as well because my name is foreign (intriguingly their telephonic system forgot that I dialed the service offered in my mother tongue at first). When I am finally told that I am transferred to the OfficeJet team, the call is dropped. I have lost 1h30 so far! I finally manage to talk to somebody competent in the OfficeJet team to which I have to email my original invoice.Not having any news, I call back a few days later. The first person I talk to cannot transfer me directly to the man who helped previously. They have to transfer me to a department that will be able to transfer me! But the call is dropped… Finally, I reach this man and am told that they will ship a new printer, but we didn’t receive it in two weeks…

It takes a lot more time to make a feature complete driver than to make a rudimentary one that it not only stable, but also supports the full capabilities of the printer.There are a lot of printers that have basic drivers for linux for example, but they don’t support the full resolution of the printer. If it were trivial work then virtually ever multifunction that had even decent sales would have complete driver support parity with the Windows drivers. In my experience that isn’t always the case.HP isn’t a lone wolf in not developing drivers for consumer models past a certain point. I’ve encountered plenty of people who have 5+ year old printers and scanners, which the vendor decided not to make Vista drivers.Someone working for one of the major vendors is free to contradict me, but I have been told by a few printer company reps that most of the cheaper inkjets are sold to wholesalers for less than the cost of production. Except for the serious business machines and some of the high end photo printers they make nothing or virtually nothing off of the printer itself. Considering that the raw materials haven’t gotten any cheaper and I can’t imagine economies of scale have improved that much in the last 7-8 years.In HP’s defense they are very good about supporting their business products. The Laserjet 5, which was a popular product through the 90s has Vista and Leopard drivers. I saw a LJ 5si with my own eyes printing from a machine running Vista Enterprise x64. HP will bend over backwards to ensure loyalty of these customers.The reason why is because the customers who are willing to drop $500+ are the only customers that you really make much money off of. Unlike the consumer models there is little question that they make margin off the printers themselves and most of your enterprise customers are buying consumables far more regularly. A lot of average consumers buy consumables fairly infrequently by comparison. I have visited a number of peoples houses where their ink cartridges were so old that the ink dried out! No business doing any significant amount of business would likely ever have that happen.Business customers by their very nature a lucrative customers. If your business expands at some point you will need to buy another printer. If the vendor’s product has above reliability for their products they will pay for it. The same things for a better feature set. Business customers will spend more money within reason if they can rationalize it as improving their bottom line.Having worked in a consumer electronics store in the past I can tell you most consumers buy printers where the vendors profits are questionable. A general consumer is far from certain to be profitable, while a business customer for HP is a sure thing.

I’m guessing you didn’t sell Konica Minoltas, then. I’ve never seen a Minolta printer that worked, even at multiple stores.

In my experience, HP is really bad at providing drivers if you’re a Windows user, too.

Just don’t buy Leopard instead. :-p

Perhaps one of the driver developers tried to get their ipod serviced after the ludacris 90 day waranty. Apples policy is to tell you to buy a new ipod.