Ammon Brown

I am annoyed. Yes, I know… anyone who has ever been a passenger in my car as I navigate the streets of Brooklyn knows that it is not difficult to get me annoyed. But I am annoyed nonetheless. All you non-geeks can tune out now.

I downloaded a handy little program to help me identify huge files on my hard drive (I once found a 4 gig log file). What I disocvered is that of all the folders on my hard drive, the HP drivers for my printer compose the the fourth largest. Why in the hell does HP think they need to have a 166 MB driver download to run a friggin printer? They bundle in a ton of crappy imaging software and trashy spoolers, readers, and massive help files that are just not helpful because they are just not needed. I have a 500 MB folder on my hard drive because HP thinks they can be a software company. They can just stuff it. I will never buy another HP.

But HP is not the only offender (just the worst). Adobe are a bunch of chumps as well. For some reason they feel that a program to open and read a PDF file needs to be a good 90 MB to work properly. Huh? The disk space required for Acrobat reader 5.0 is up to 24 MB. 7.0 requires up to 90 MB. And the only real difference I see is prettier buttons in 7.0 and about 10 times as long to load. No thank you, Adobe. Go find a bigger throat to cram your massive wares down. I found a handy tiny little PDF reader called Foxit that is 1 MB, does not require 20 minutes to download and 15 to install, and runs blazingly fast. Cheers to the little guy! Now I need someone to make smaller drivers for my printer.

What is with these companies? Do they think bigger software will translate to bigger market share? Is it directly proportional to stock price? I hope both companies tank. It is a sick form of arragance that they think they know what users need better than the users do. Make your crap optional! Don’t get me started on Windows, that bundling argument is so old.