The sender, I hope, was severely reprimanded. There’s not much good that can be said about an individual that would intentionally bring toxic formats and the software attached to them into their own country. No need to tolerate them trying for your country, too.

That e-mail for a printer has got to be embarrassing as it can get for HP. That has to be one of the most inefficient, insecure and clumsy ways of getting data from one point to another. Aren’t marketeers required to run anything past engineering anymore, or have the engineers fallen in quality that much? Are the new hires that lacking in education that this is what they come up with?

As for ‘later’, that’s a standard M$ tactic to get people to sit on their hands and let M$ encroach. Name one case where a proposal to implement MS-only technology first has expanded to become cross-platform or open standards?

Files-over-e-mail is also a red alert for the pathetic state of IT staff if they aren’t able to set up their users’ desktops to be able to transfer files from the desktop to the printer.

The only system that is virtually impossible to network is Windows, so it is no surprise that this embarrassing gaff locks users deeper into M$ formats. If we’re lucky, we’ll see a prohibition of shipping these to the EU, where the OpenDocument Format is the way forward.

HP could save a lot of money, time, work, and reputation by putting effort into opening drivers, helping CUPS development, or other cross-platform support.