The other evening I decided to finally get around to setting up my home Windows 7 machine to print to the printer hosted by my wife’s XP machine in the other room.  I wasn’t expecting it to take too much time – both machines were already sharing files across our Windows Home Group, I’d installed my share of printers on my share of Windows Server networks back in the day, Windows 7 is the result of a chastened post-Vista Microsoft ‘getting religion’ on user friendliness, and the printer in question was a popular current model from Hewlett Packard.

No problem, right?

Well… problem.  What follows is the sad story of how it ended up taking almost two hours of the limited time I have at home during the workweek to get this done…

My first approach, naively enough, was to try adding the printer through “Add a Printer” in “Devices and Printers”.  Initially, things were looking good – Windows 7 saw the shared printer immediately, and within seconds, a warm and fuzzy printer icon (with an equally warm and fuzzy green ‘default printer’ check mark over it) appeared in my Control Panel.  Printer status?  Ready!  “Nice”, I’m thinking to myself at this point, “the HP printer CD must have installed Windows 7-compatible drivers on the XP host machine”.

But while I now had a friendly and reassuring icon of a successfully installed default printer to look at, I couldn’t print a test page.  Nada.  Zilch.  There was, in fact, no printer on the other end of that warm and fuzzy printer icon with the equally warm and fuzzy green ‘default printer’ check mark over it.

At this point, it occurred to me I had two issues: first, apparently Hewlett Packard never imagined that in 2010 an XP machine might need to share their very popular printer model to a Windows 7 machine, so they felt no need to go to the trouble of making the XP driver installation Windows 7-compatible.  Secondly, although Windows 7 cheerfully presented me with an installed and ready default printer icon, apparently that was little more than wishful thinking on the part of my operating system -  in fact, there was no printer.

So OK, on to plan B: get out there on those internets and do me some research (Google having just about made user manuals irrelevant).  After visiting half a dozen sites (including a web chat with a nice lady from far far away who worked for HP), it appeared that the only alternative was to give up on XP printer hosting altogether, manually create a local port on the Windows 7 machine pointing to the Home Group NetBIOS name of the XP machine-slash-printer share name, then install a local driver on the Windows 7 machine to point at that port.  Are your eyes glazing over yet?  I hope not, because we’re not done: my next problem was that although my OS was completely updated and this printer had been on the market since at least 2009, Windows 7 didn’t have a native driver for it.

My evening was slipping away – so with increasing frustration and impatience, I grabbed the Hewlett Packard CD and ran it on the Windows 7 machine.  This was my next mistake – before I knew it, the CD had installed (without offering any user opt-out whatsoever) a total of 7 entirely superfluous applications – gems such as “HP Photo Creations” and “HP Smart Web Printing”. If there’s anything more annoying than reassuring Potemkin Village misinformation about non-existent devices coming from my operating system, it’s bloated driver installation CDs littering my machine with unneeded ‘helper’ applications.  It gets worse, though: the one piece of software I did need (a working Windows 7 driver) seemed to be the one piece of software this HP installation CD was incapable of installing!  That’s right, the wizard refused to complete without seeing a real live printer on the other end of a real live USB cable – evidently my dummy ‘local’ port wasn’t good enough.

Now it’s getting personal, this battle against the combined forces of evil that Microsoft and HP had come to represent by this point.  Dragging a printer over to a remote machine temporarily for the sole purpose of getting through the wizard was a prospect I rejected on principle, so I went back to the HP website, found the Windows 7 driver I couldn’t get to from the HP printer install wizard, downloaded it, installed it, pointed it at my phantom printer port, and lo and behold… at almost two hours in, the welcome sound of a test page successfully printing emanated from the other room – and I was witness to the miracle that is shared printing from XP to Windows 7.   That the phantom Windows 7 printer port is named “HP Photosmart C4600 series (Copy 1)” because the whole process had somehow left a half-installed orphaned instance of the printer somewhere deep within the OS that my Printers and Devices “Control” Panel can’t see and/or delete – well, that’s something I can live with.  I was just happy to get out of Dodge with a working printer.

There are a lot of these stories out there: rants from frustrated new device owners and other victims of unfriendly and poorly-designed software – does the web need another one?  Probably not.  However, in keeping with the ‘current events’ focus here at digitalmissive, I’m posting this in the context of the recent news that Microsoft and HP are banding together to try and build an iPad killer.

Both companies have tried and failed at this before – and that was before Apple showed up and hit the home run that is the iPad.  If that wasn’t enough, HP finds itself in the market for a new CEO after the latest in a long series of distracting boardroom dramas.  I would hope HP management brings in some new product design talent while they’re at it – because based on my experience the other evening, at least some of the folks still building stuff at these 2 companies give every indication of being clueless as to why the Apple juggernaut they’re about to go up against is as successful as it is.

Say what you want about Apple: their technology is fundamentally closed, Android’s gaining on them, they have a shameless spin-meister as CEO (not so unusual in tech), they’re increasingly arrogant, and these days they seem ripe for a “pride-goeth-before-a-fall” corporate misstep of some sort.   Nevertheless, Apple is one of the remarkably few consumer technology companies out there that ‘gets it’ in terms of the value of a good user experience – and ‘getting it’ is crucial to success in the tablet business, which, let’s face it, has at least as much in common with the consumer electronics business as it does with the ‘computer’ business.

If my evening last Wednesday is any indication, this is something Microsoft and HP are going to have to work on a bit more if they’re going to bring a compelling tablet to market.