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Palo Alto, CA – HP announced that instead of getting their printer drivers to work with Windows they had created their own operating system.
"It was a lot easier to do that than to figure out why our drivers kept crashing systems," said HP software engineer Harold Wong. "Our drivers were at 300 MB and still didn't work, so we said 'screw this' and made our own OS."
Wong said their OS is "99% compatible" with Windows. "Users should not see any problems unless they load new programs after the drivers are installed, or if they try to print a large PDF."
The HP OS is called Windows. "We didn't want to confuse the consumer with new names, but we wanted to distinguish our product, so we italicized the 'o'," said HP marketing director Sarah Wankins.
Microsoft representatives said they looked into suing HP over trademark violations, but HP gave them a discount on ink and toner which was worth a lot more money. "A user is going to have an average computing experience either way. What do we care if it's Windows or Windows?" said Brian Leach from Microsoft.
Consumers were generally happy with the new OS from HP. Bob Nelson from Florida said, "None of my programs work but at least I can print a test page without a blue screen."
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