These corporations keep testing the limits for consumers. Now there’s a company pushing a monthy charge to use your home printer. That’s a wacky idea. No thank you! Here’s writer, comedian and part-time guitarist (also home printing enthusiast) Michael Loftus with some insights into: Subscription fees gone wild! They all want you to use their app. They all want to collect your data. And no, they want you to pay them every month! It’s a gutsy ask; I’ll give them that.
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Sadly, I fear that your new Epson will probably follow the same path.
I’ve owned a number of great Epson Scanners. Until, of course, I didn’t..
This was back before they’d even thought up the Subscription Bullshit!!!
They simply sent an Update, via the Innerweb, and told my Scanner to shut down. And it did.
I’ve scanned nothing since.
I still use the last version of The Adobe Creative Suite that you could actually purchase (and which I did) not having to Subscribe To.
This is, sadly, the wave of the future.
Keep in mind… When we first paid for Cable Television We Saw No Advertisements.
We didn’t have to see ads because we were Watching TV That We Were Paying For!!!
And it showed us BOOBIES!!! WE PAID TO SEE BOOBIES AND WE SAW BOOBIES!!!
Now we pay to see Loftus on Gutfeld and we see Metamucil and numerous other advertisements for digestive relief solutions.
Say Huh!?!
I hear ya. The subscription model is legit being pushed everywhere. I’m just going to keep yelling about how it’s all bullshit. And BMW isn’t doing the seat warmer subscription anymore. Too many people go mad. Woohoo!
Now this topic has caused a rant which must be delivered in a polite but firm manner! – I remember the ancient ok-boomer times when H/P was a company that made some of the finest test equipment known to humanity and invented too many things underpinning our modern technology to list. None of it was cheap. Somewhere along the line, the professional test gear was spun off into Agilent and departed h/p forever. Agilent and its pro-level competitors still make great gear and likely always will. H/P kept the computer business, and has done very well in the public eye until now with this mess with the subscription business model on printers. I am offended by such a poo in the punch bowl. The printer of this class, like many other goods, has been skint to the bone to squeeze every last hay-penny out of the cost, because the shareholders scream for more and more, and the accountants and lawyers have run amok to make it so. Could it be based upon a decade of short-sighted “quarterly-cost-reduction-goal-based bonuses”? and trying to make up the weight unjustly? Hmm. HP makes excellent computers and printers -all sizes of both including enterprise and business-scale — but I’m afraid our cherished old h/p is in danger of embracing this beacon-like high-visibility Fox-Pass and gaining a reputation among the population of Printer Customers of becoming, er.. what do they call something like that? – “A Wired Sepulcher” I think, is the biblical term. “Clean and Pretty on the outside, but containing only Dead Bones of Engineers’ Expectations”. — I agree with the author, it’s like “h/p how dare you cheat us this way?” OK, I’m in charge of much more test equipment than computers and printers, so it’s not as bad for me and there’s still that h/p spirit of excellence alive in our Agilent and other test gear (Tektronix has its OWN powerful spirits). None of it has ‘licensing’ -because the competition won’t permit such a model to exist.. The simple solution may just be for h/p to have more printer competition! If faced with the abomination of surprise licensing fees for something we already own, the old printers from the back rooms will do until we can order from a vendor with a ‘no subscription clause’ in the contract (that’s a good idea right there) and dispose of the offending gear on secondary markets (that’s also good idea right there -I was going to say Craigslist but that would have been uncalled-for.) Hey h/p, our peripherals budgets are as vast as are our choices. Stop messing up the product value by charging twice for it.
It’s yet another issue we need to stay loud about. We have all the leverage. Thank you so much for your insight and chiming in!