
Is anybody else out there as frustrated as I am by the built-in obsolescence of IT products?
When I upgraded my Mac to “Snow Leopard” (OS 10.6) recently, all of a sudden my wonderful Hewlett-Packard “All-In-One” printer, scanner, copier became a “One,” that is, just a printer.
So I bit the bullet and called HP support, and got a charming and helpful person who basically said, “We don’t support that product.” I asked her if they anticipated creating drivers for it? “No, we no longer support that product.”
Which translates into, “We are not creating drivers to make the product you bought from us a few years ago functional, because we want you to buy a new product from us and put the old one in the land-fill.” SHAME!
My machine was about three years old. Would we accept that from a company that made, say, refrigerators or lawn mowers?
But their policy of built-in obsolescence is smart from a purely economic point of view, because I did end up buying another product from them, a good product at a good price (I had to spend the better part of another afternoon on the phone with them to get it to work on my Mac, but that is another story for another day.)
So I didn’t even punish them for their policy by buying from another company. Why? Because their product was better and cheaper, and every hardware company, even my much-favored Apple, builds in obsolescence with constant newer, better and faster software. If you want to stay up, you have to pay up!
But what happens to all these old computers and printers that still work fine, or would if they could run the newer software? They get thrown away and added to the garbage of the planet.
So what would a “Green” IT company look like? And at what point would it become in these companies’ best interest to attend to being good stewards of the earth? Just wondering.