Things That Are Broken: An Introduction

I recently purchased a printer/scanner/fax machine to replace the one we wore out. It's a Lexmark 6500 series, pretty fancy, network enabled, all that good stuff. I installed everything on the iMac and tried to print something when my text editor crashed. That's right, trying to print something crashed TextEdit. Yeah. I tried printing from Firefox. Crash. Mac's, TextEdit, and Firefox are all pretty reliable--must be a problem with the print driver.

Well, I was able to confirm that it was a driver issue coupled with some weirdness in the install script--so I ran the installer again, which meant reinstalling all sorts of peripheral shovelware that I wasn't interested in, but what can you do? Same deal. I tried again. After a few hours, I gave up. I booted into Windows on the very same computer and was able to install the printer without any problem. I printed a test page, at which point the computer loudly announced that it was printing. Then the page printed. Then the computer announced that it was through. It installed several product suites, which I have no use for, some of which load on start-up and

Le sigh. All I wanted was a printer that any computer in our house could print to. We have both PC's and Mac's so it would need to be cross-platform compatible (which this Lexmark claims to be--even though the Mac installer didn't work). Ideally, all an installer would have to do would be install the printer driver, configure the printer to show up on the network, and perhaps provide some kind of access to the scanner functions. Those are simple and necessary functions. Not all that complicated, but it failed at that. Talking print queues and fancy interfaces are non-essential. Those are called "value-adds" (assuming that they have any value at all). These kind of things are showy, but they tax a computer's resources and are nearly always bulky and poorly made. This is a quintessential example of placing style over substance.

In short, this is broken. I saw an interesting video from marketing guru Seth Godin the other day (although the video is several years old) in which he describes the ways and reasons that things are broken. It's about a twenty minute video, but it's pretty entertaining (although his points get a little muddled throughout). One thing he said that was absolutely true is that once you are aware that much of the world is "broken", you start to notice it more. I noticed it with the printer. But I noticed a couple different things. The product is broken because it lacks functionality that it ought to have and because it tries to cripple my computer to prevent me from using anything else to print. Part of this is poor design and just bad work, so in a certain sense, Lexmark the institution is broken, but in a different way. And another part of the problem is because there is no standard for print drivers, absolutely everything is proprietary, and there's no reason that this should be the case. Mac OS includes something like 3 gigs of print drivers so you can plug-and-play most models. That's absurd.

So we have a broken product. We've all encountered those. Things that are supposed to do one thing but do it poorly, don't do it at all, or perform a number of non-essential tasks that obstruct primary functionality. Then we have a broken company that thinks the best way to win and retain customers is to force shovelware onto our computers and to falsely adverstise that they are Mac compatible. In other words, this is a company whose business practices are about deception and corner-cutting rather than building a good product and getting it to the appropriate customers.

But I'm much more enthralled with the idea of a broken system. For a company that makes printers, it seems to be in their interest to use a proprietary print driver. But because all these companies use different drivers, we have no standard, and the customer loses in the end. But there was no malicious intent, no selfish desires. The system simply failed.

I'm getting a little long-winded, so I'm going to draw to a close, but I think that over the next few weeks I'll be peppering the usual tripe with some discussion about systems that are broken because their nature is fundamentally flawed. Could get interesting.

It's worth noting that broken systems still function. They just don't function well, or correctly. Keep that in mind, because we'll be talking about a lot of systems that seem to work, at least on the surface.

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