HP’s New Printer Update Is Making Everyone Mad. It’s the 1 Thing No Company Should Ever Do

If you buy a thing, you probably think the deal is pretty simple: You give a company money for, say, a pen, and you can use the pen for as long as you want. Or at least until you break it or the ink runs out. Of course, when the ink does run out, chances are pretty good you can just buy more ink from anyone who sells a compatible refill. 

If you’re the pen company, you would love it if your customers come back to buy ink from you, but you can’t force them. And you shouldn’t be spending time trying to force them. You should just focus on making great pens and charge a reasonable amount for refills and let your customers decide. That’s how every business should work.

If, however, you buy an inkjet printer from a company like, say, HP, things are a lot more complicated. In fact, a recent automatic firmware update will only let you use the printer you bought from HP if you’re using ink cartridges you also bought from HP. HP says this is because it’s trying to protect you from someone hacking into your printer through the chip on a rogue ink cartridge, I guess? 

Here’s what HP says about the firmware update: 

This Firmware includes dynamic security measures, which are used to block cartridges using a non-HP chip or modified or non-HP electronic circuitry. The printer is intended to work only with new or reused cartridges that have a new or reused HP chip or circuitry. Periodic firmware updates will maintain the effectiveness of the dynamic security measures and block cartridges that previously worked.

The update also includes a link to learn more about these “dynamic security measures.” Here’s what that page says:

HP printers are designed to work with original HP ink and toner cartridges. As is standard in the printing business, HP printers use a process to authenticate cartridges. In certain HP printers, this authentication process includes dynamic security measures. Dynamic security relies on the printer’s ability to communicate with the security chips or electronic circuitry on the cartridges. HP uses dynamic security measures to protect the quality of our customer experience, maintain the integrity of our printing systems, and protect our intellectual property.

As you can imagine, people are not happy.

It’s almost humorous that HP uses the phrase “protect the quality of our customer experience” to describe a feature that literally bricks a device for which you paid them a few hundred dollars. That’s not what anyone would consider a quality customer experience. It’s also not funny at all. 

It’s not like there is some kind of epidemic of malware that your printer needs to be protected from. I mean, I’m sure there is someone out there willing to spend the time to hack into your HP inkjet printer, but for what? What could they possibly gain? Also, mass-producing ink cartridges seems like a really difficult way to go about it.

Also, so what? Seriously, so what if I want to use cartridges full of cottage cheese? Yes, it will ruin the printer, but I paid for the printer. If I want to go Office Space on it and take it to the parking lot and smash it with a bat, there’s nothing HP can do about it. The same should be true about using scary third-party ink cartridges. Especially since the only real risk they pose is to HP’s bottom line. 

The reason this is a thing is that printer companies decided to sell printers at a loss and make up the difference by selling you cartridges containing one of the most expensive liquids on earth. It’s not that printer ink is hard to make or rare, it’s just expensive because that’s what companies decided to charge and they get away with it by forcing you to buy it from them. 

There is literally no functional reason to restrict the use of third-party ink. It’s purely about the business model. And it’s a bad one. 

As a result, HP is basically making up scary reasons that it should force you to use its own ink cartridges because the real reason just sounds greedy. Still, lying to your customers because the truth would make you look bad is the one thing a company should never do.

Instead, you should be honest with your customers and treat them fairly. That means letting them give you money for a product without forcing or expecting them to pay you more money for the life of that product. 

It’s one thing if you’re providing an extra service, but printer ink is a commodity. Its only purpose is to get sprayed onto paper when people have to print out a report or a school assignment or an Amazon return label. It’s not special or fancy, and HP should not require you to buy the ink cartridges it sells just to use the printer you already paid for. 

The same goes for whatever you sell. If you’re trying to increase your revenue by making the thing your customers paid for stop working if they don’t pay you more money, that’s not smart business, it’s extortion. 

The people who work at HP and think this is a good idea are wrong. It might look good for the bottom line, but making the experience of using your product worse is always bad for business.