Well, according to my “List for a Successful Business,” it is essential for a business to have a Fax Machine. It’s kind of crazy how many people still use faxes. But I guess you need to sign things all the time, and getting a fax machine is much easier than trying to understand how digital signatures work.

We now have a fax machine, well, a multipurpose machine; the Canon MF4270. As expected with most consumer electronics devices, it sucks.

First, you can blame the 10lbs of the shipping weight to the inclusion of printed manuals that are completely unnecessary. Thanks Canon, that Portuguese manual really helped me out. Seriously…talk about a company that doesn’t want paper to go away any time soon. You think a company like Canon, who has been making this stuff forever would have these devices simple and easy to set up without requiring you to read hundreds of pages. To its credit, it does work well, as long as the machine is used on it’s own (as a copier and fax machine.)

I think Canon employs monkeys to write their drivers. First off, none of their features (like scanning) are supported on the Mac. Only network printing and faxing are supported. That is fine, but even then, good luck setting that up. The driver installation is a disaster. They use an old VISE installer that forces you to quit every application before installation can start. Also, don’t expect wireless printing to work with a Linksys WRT54G. For some reason, they don’t like each other. It’s pretty obvious they don’t bother with user testing.

I called Canon support a few times. The one tech I talked to admitted he never used a Mac before, but still insisted on me to “right click and select properties…” even though I kept telling him I’m not using Windows. He was like Sarah Palin, just sticking to his talking points written specifically for a Windows machine, and ignoring every question I ask.

Anyway, I write this to say, how horrible consumer electronics still is. Why do companies do such a bad job of writing software that bridges between devices and the computer? Is it intentional? Maybe it’s time we make the Laws of Simplicity required reading.