Bruce wrote:
> So the situation is this: the bag was about 3/4 full of ink, about $24
> worth, if the cartridge's price has anything to do with its worth (which,
> at $36/cartridge, seems unlikely).

I once got a tour of the HP facility in Corvallis Oregon.  Passing over
a large warehouse area, I noticed three large plastic bottles along one
wall.  Each was cube shaped, around 1 meter on a side, and each was
sitting on its own pallet.  The bottles were translucent.  One was full
of Cyan ink, one was full of Magenta ink, and the last was full of Yellow
ink.  One of the things they did there was to take these big bottles of
ink ant turn then into itty-bitty little ink cartridges that sold for
around $37.  The person giving me the tour said that they thought it
cost HP something like $3 to produce each one.  I suspect that the
economics of LaserJet Toner Cartridges are similar.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the profit on printer supplies
is likely to be significantly greater than that on any other business that
HP is in.

Isn't it a standard axiom of marketing that you give the razors away only
to charge a lot of money for the blades?  Once the consumer has your brand
of razor, they are much more likely to buy the blades that fit it rather
than buy a whole new razor, even if the price of the blades is relatively
painful.

I believe HP announced a while back the creation of a new company to make
and sell sub-$100 ink jet printers.  It's only a matter of time before
competition between HP and Epson and the other ink sellers forces the
price of a printer down to essentially zero (but it won't come with any
ink).  I would expect to soon start seeing this type of printer bundled
into most PC purchases as an essentially no-cost option (plus $ink).

As always: Let the buyer beware.

It's kind of annoying that large corporations have to behave this way,
especially when it extends to including a bit of active malevolence in
each ink cartridge, whose job is to prevent the user from doing anything
that is not 100% in the interest of the manufacturer.  Unfortunately HP
is by no means unique in this behavior, and society seems to be moving
rapidly in this direction.  The "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" passed
last year, and the soon to be passed rewrite of the part of the Uniform
Commercial Code that covers things like shrink-wrap software licenses
(UCC 2B) are giving intellectual property owners total control over the
way that consumers use their information, and thus extensive control
over the behavior of individuals in society.

Imagine buying a hammer only to find that it is a federal crime to strike
any object with the hammer other than nails approved by the manufacturer
of that hammer (or whatever other restrictions the manufacturer feels like
dreaming up).  We seem to be moving more towards a world in which consumers
exist only to support corporations, rather than the other way around.  It's
rather depressing.

On the other hand, it's odd to see this happening at the same time that
things like Linux (and the concept of "OpenSource" in general) are becoming
popular.  It will be very interesting to see how all this turns out.

G.