[Still Thinking]

They all love to do that though. There’s always been good money in doing something the OS already does. Remember back in the DOS days there were half a dozen apps that did nothing more than tweak your config.sys and autoexec to use himem and free up space in the lower 640. None of them did anything that you couldn’t do in Edit for yourself, none of them even did it any better than a halfway experienced geek could, but the all made these products. And some of them made money at it. There’s always a market for a slightly better UI, or even a quicker to find but otherwise identical UI.

But all those arguments only justify Brother's making available their crap software on the primise someone might prefer it, which I would have no objection to. What pisses me off is designing their hardware so you have to use their software which has no actual function. I mean for God's sake, the thing has slots for memory cards so you can print pictures from your digicam, and when one's plugged in the unit has an FTP server so you can drill into the memory card from a networked PC. How hard would it have been to have the fax and scan storage look like a network share, or at least have it visible via the very same FTP server? But no, you have to run their bloatware.

[boogerbear]

Well that’s monkey see monkey do. One printer company includes some stupid software that replicates Windows functionality, then one computer magazine includes that in the list of “features” when comparing various printers and of course nobody else has that checkmark and now EVERYBODY adds that to their next round of drivers.

It’s all about the checkboxes and the need to be all things to all people.