My Letter to the CEO of HP

Hello.

I am a technical support rep and have been coming on 5 years. I have seen myriad technical problems, interacted with a lot of software and hardware, and beat my head against many a machine in efforts to get them to work. I am capable and incredibly handsome. I work mainly in the medical field, and when we need something to work, it MUST work. Lives could be on the line.

I say the above so maybe you don't take the below lightly.

I HATE YOUR SOFTWARE. It is almost entirely ad-ridden junk that slows PCs down, adds a million desktop icons and programs within the control panel, and for all of its over-sized bullcrap, half the time the insipid filth DOESN'T EVEN DO ITS JOB.

Can I ask a few rhetorical questions? Of course I can. I'm the customer. WHY does the average HP customer need software that:
1. Advertises a product they have already bought and continues to do so until the software is uninstalled
2. Tries to update already bloated software every day and uses valuable PC resources to do so
3. Takes half an hour or more to download on slower network connections (wasting EVERYONE'S time) because it is almost 50 MB for a bare-bones no-nonsense printer
4. Spreads through a PC like a virus, touching and taking control of things that it has no business doing, often making the uninstall process laborious, and in some cases impossible but for a reload of the OS
5. Has an impossibly annoying interface, that often takes over half the screen to tell you where to buy genuine HP toner/ink/supplies that you don't even need yet

Early in my career, I spent a large portion of my time diagnosing and fixing HP software issues. Be it printer drivers that refuse to work or just break after months of working, or a 'smart' fax machine refusing to be recognized via USB or the network. I've seen newly bought HP PCs and laptops with so much bloatware pre-installed (which you can only trust to be gone after an OS reload) that it crawls along when a similarly equipped non-HP laptop zips through tasks no problem. I have taken loads of customer complaints about your software noticeably slowing a system. I could get very detailed with the little hell you've provided me, but alas, letters to the CEO can only be 3500 characters long.

And what can a customer do when they don't have me to wrestle with their systems for them? They call support.

Oh, goodness help me, HP support.

When you manage to make it though the laborious and kludgy phone system, you get to speak to someone who #1 doesn't speak English and #2 cannot help you in any technical sense.

I'll save the support complaints for later. I'm sure you get those all the time. In fact, I bet you get many letters such as this, from many tech support folks.

There is a reason for this, and that reason is: YOUR SOFTWARE IS ABHORRENT AND A PLAGUE ON MANKIND.

Thank you very much for you time. Please stop making software. You don't know how.

In the immortal words of Donny Astricky, "Honey, I cain't swim, I know I cain't. So you know what I do? I stay my black ass out the pool!"

--Charles Nasworthy
--Application Support Analyst II