I was checking out the website of one of my favourite Geek Gods, Matthias Wandel, when I came upon a rant of his that I had been brewing myself, to whit: Hardware as a Trojan horse for software services.

Oddly enough, my complaint is also with an HP. The drivers for my new printer nobble fullscreen games by opening then immediately concealing windows at uncertain intervals, go CPU-bound and hold up my music composing program, and are generally way overblown for their purpose, which is to make my printer work. I just ran “Stop HP Product Survey” from the start menu and I got two choices:

Note neither of these says “Cancel”, nor is there a close box, nor indeed any standard GUI furniture that tells me I am in control of the computer.

HP’s shonky driver software also fails to honour paper selections made through the standard boxes. You have to drill down further into the settings, past the paper selection screen, to another special HP paper selection screen. Slack.

The worrying truth is that the driver to make software any good is gone: in the 80s and early 90s, it was important to make a piece of software appealing to the end user, or it wouldn’t get used. Now, for all practical purposes, it is mandatory that you have windows, that you have MS Office… there is no need to convince the end user of anything except his utter lack of authority in his relationship with the vendor.