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HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They literally hired a person to gatekeep the printers? That is such a waste time time. One of the many reasons why corporate sucks.
Oh, they also did the same thing with a nextcloud server. There was some plugin for word or something that they needed for their workflow. But they weren't going pay the $10 for the plugin for every every user. So they licensed it for a few clerical admins (might even be the same as the printer people) and if you needed to share a file with a customer, you emailed it to them and they stuck it on the nextcloud server and emailed the customer.
And another one is Zoom. Again, we had meeting admins with a paid zoom license. So if you wanted a meeting that wouldn't get cut off after 40 minutes, you email the meeting admins and they would schedule it.