Consumer Tech - Getting Worse w/ Each Generation?

The Rev asks: "I always thought the next generation of a technology was supposed to be easier to use and have more features than the last one. My experiences with TV oriented technologies is as far from that myth as can be! :-( So are Slashdot's experiences with such technologies. Do you feel things are moving backwards with each new generation instead of forwards?" Read on for Rev's take on how digital cable has gone backwards in his opinion. Have any of you experienced the same with similar or other forms of consumer technology?

"Two years ago I had analog cable-TV. I could program the box to change channels at arbitrary times and when I wasn't changing channels, it displayed the time. These programs could also be repeating ones. I was happy. Then digital cable-TV came out. It would only let me set non-repeating programs and they have to be for the beginning of a specific programme. This meant I could not program (for taping on my VCR) the whole of one programme and the end of another (that overlaps with the first). Say a movie overlaps with the first 10 minutes of a football game. If you feel it's much more important to get the whole of the movie and miss the beginning of the game...tough! You now have to miss the end of the movie. *sigh*

Then I moved house into a difference region of the same digital-TV company. Their digital-TV boxes are different yet again. I used to be able to configure how much in advance of a programme beginning that the on-screen dialog reminding me of the impending programme would appear. Now I have to accept the hard-coded interval whatever it is. What's really bad with this box is that if I want to see what's on tomorrow (actually any time after midnight) I have to do so whilst watching adverts for pay-per-view movies rather than the channel I was watching. :-(

Then this new box died and I was given a replacement that's a mark 2 model and this new box doesn't let me tape terrestrial channels whilst watching digital ones (a feature that UK readers will recognize). They're obviously trying to get me to rent a second digital-TV cable box (for £15 per month) by taking away this feature. :-("

Comments

Avoid the whole problem all together...

[zulux]

Don't forget the ultimate solution to a lot of life's problems: avoidance.

So in this particular case, sell your TV and get rid of your expensive TV susbscription. With the new found room, get yourself a book-shelf and go to your local library and get some books. With your new found money, save up for a year and go on vacation. Here in the states, a year's worth of satelite TV subscription savings will buy a week long road trip.

Reading books and going on vacation are a lot more interesting than watching a lot of TV. But maby that's just me - perhaps TV really is that good now days. I just don't care to find out, as TV had become sort of an adiction for me, and inorder to cure myself of it, I quit.

Lack of Customer Service

[D.A. Zollinger]

This doesn't have so much to do with technology as it does with policy and the lack of customer service in an industry with little or no competition. Since cable companies have monopolies in the areas they service (no one wants to see 10 seperate cable backbones running on the telephone poles) the cable companies get to dictate how their service is used.

What about Satellite service you say? Well, Satellite is limited in what they can offer, and how they can provide their service. Your cable company is very aware of what Satellite can provide, because they know that Satellite is their only real threat. Your cable company figures that as long as their service is one step above what Satellite can offer, you aren't going to take a 'downgrade'.

Thus, instead of working to provide a better user experience, they are trying to offer as little as possible, while maximizing their profits. How does it feel to be used?

Re:Short answer:

[ealar dlanvuli]

It's funny, I've always found "Hacker" products are the closest thing to what computers promise, easy of use and lots of functionality. Products made from "Marketing" tend to be a bunch of prety but often slightly less functionality with it.

Examples (:me puts on flame retardant suit)
1: Mozilla is clearly more functional than IE, IE is clearly "pretier" than mozilla in its default state.
2: (Your WM of choice here, to avoid the argument, I personally like KDE) is clearly more functional than XP's interface (at least once it's fully tweaked), XP's interface is clearly pretier (it's becoming less so with each generation of user class WM's).
3: Winamp/xmms just works, some later versions are getting bloated, but not that much, on the other side we have Real and to a lesser extent WMP (though WMP is fairly decent, Winamp is still cleaner than it for simply playing music).

The examples continue but those were the most obvious when I was writing this, I'm sure everyone can think of parallels to other industries. Basically it boils down to "Marketing exists to tell the consumer he wants something, Engineering exists to make the consumer want something", thats perhaps the most succulent way to state it.

Getting worse...yes, if you're not the target

[blastedtokyo]

For your example, the economics are quite simple. You were the .0003% of the population that knew how to program your VCR and cared about how you did it.

The cable companies did their math and tried to make it so that 80% of people could record something. All they'd have to do is oversimply things and cut features

. End result is that technology gets better for joe blows and plainly blows for the enthusiasts out there. The good news is that companies are finally starting to realize that enthusiasts can make a differnece (i.e. people who love their _____ energize others to buy ______).

They don't make'm like they used to

[smoondog]

This is the They-don't-make'm-like-they-used-to syndrome. Probably the best example of this is camera's. Cameras of 20 years ago sell today for nearly as much as they cost when they were sold! They depreciate slower than inflation! The cameras of today are fancy microchip powered wonders that are cheap, easy to break, plastic boxes. Funny thing is, these cameras generally only add auto-focus over the nikon,olympus and canon cameras of the 70's & 80's.

-Sean