Hard disagree. This is how Chrome won the browser wars - people ask their nerdy cousin which browser to use.
The market of HN is small, but the market power is large. Also, I guarantee you people here make large corporate purchases for things like printers, networking equipment - stuff HP cares about.
Browsers are free, so the choice is to get "the best". With printers the cheapest is often "good enough" and inkjet printers have an intentionally low up front cost. Convincing people that a laser printer is the cheaper choice even if they think that they "barely print anything" is an uphill battle.
I have family members ask to _fix_ their printers, never had one actually taking advice before buying one nor follow advice.
And the reason is simple:
- Google has a tremendous positive brand image in most people's mind, Brother means nothing outside of the elderly generation.
- Printers are seen as a commodity and get thrown at people for 30 bucks at the supermarket. They also work well for the first 30~40 prints, and while we'll bitch about printer ink price, regular people will see it as a cost of doing business and pay.
- Brother printers are reliable but actually not that good from a "what features do you have ?" customer standpoint. I ended up having a secundary HP printer for that very reason: it fits in a niche that no other sane printer maker will touch. And come to think of it, my parents bought the same HP printer after seeing use it in vacation, and they never asked about our Xerox in the living room. And yes, they buy HP cartridges (they also didn't ask me before buying...)
Large corporate purchases: nobody "buys" printer or ink. They comes with a lease and a maintenance contract, and are paid by the page. If the technician comes within 3h to fix the printer and it works ok for another 40 days, no office manager will care about what exact printers are set in the buildings.
What are you thoughts about Canon? I just brought one recently. It has an option for me to opt into disabling support for third party toner cartridges. You read that correctly. It lets you use third party toner cartridges by default and if I do not want to be able to use them, I can opt into disabling them.
On the other hand, Brother prevents cartridges from being reused more than once, which likely kills the market for remanufactured toner cartridges.
I bought a Canon (model LBP612C/613C) color laser printer 3 years ago and have been using 3rd party toner. The prints are great and I've never had a problem. Prior to that I used a Brother b&w laser, also used 3rd party toner, and never had an issue with that one either.
How ironic, the very thing OP warned against happened to Chrome: being now a monopoly it pushes very uncool stuff and no amount of geeks can undo that.
The market of HN is small, but the market power is large. Also, I guarantee you people here make large corporate purchases for things like printers, networking equipment - stuff HP cares about.