Slashdot Mirror
Consumer Tech - Getting Worse w/ Each Generation?
"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. :-("
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.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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?
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
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.
I live in a giant bucket.
You are a highly trained consumer. You believe them when they say "Digital cable is better". They eventually offer channels on digital cable you can't get on regular to force upgrades. They cross pollinate commercials so you can realize what you are missing because you don't get the apes on meth channel, which has a new series everybody will talk about at work the next morning while you think about last night's rerun of "Gilligan's Island".
You have been bred in captivity just to upgrade, and when they take a feature away it is only for your own good.
And they know exactly where your breaking point is. They will remove features one by one, forcing you to watch what they want you to watch (why do you think so many channels start their shows at odd times?). Just before the point where you switch to another provider or give it up alltogether they'll blast you with 'new' features you've 'got' to have.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you, Consumer.
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 ______).
It seems obvious to me that those bastards at General Instrument (or whatever they're called these days) that make the majority of set top boxes have absolutely zero knowledge of how to make a decent user interface. It's not just the cable company's boxes, apparently the satellite ones are terrible too. The biggest problem to me is that they are never responsive to the remote control. You can push a button three or four times but the thing is so slow repainting the godawful menus (with unwelcomed banner ads these days) that it seems to have no processor cycles left to pay attention to the remote's signal. The end result: you have to slowly press buttons, watching the screen repaint pixel by pixel before issuing the next command. I find it almost impossible to believe that they cannot put sufficient hardware in these things to repaint the menus within the span of a couple of frames.
And let's not even talk about the total lack of ability to remove channels from the lineup. I'm sure it has to do with the fact that companies want you to see just exactly you're missing by not paying for the $80/month plan, but this functionality has been present in TVs for decades now. Why is it that most of the set top boxes make you flip through channels that you either don't receive, don't pay for, or have zero interest in? Why in the love of christ should you have to slowly wait for 15 different pay-per-view channels scroll past when you use the channel up/down buttons? I could go on, but I don't think it would do any good.
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
It's not just about cable TV - the same applies to almost any "user friendly" modern device of any significant complexity.
I have two video recorders. One was a very cheap own-brand from a large chain here in the UK. The other was a Sony Nicam box costing more than twice the price.
Cheap box:
* has an LCD screen on the remote so I can set the timer without turning the TV on (think "running late for work")
* will let me enter a timer event that begins earlier than the current time (e.g. five minutes ago)
* Has the traditional "zero stop" option on the counter
Sony Box:
* Requires me to use the OSD to set the timer, but only allows cursor keys and enter - I can't punch the time in on the numeric buttons directly
* All timers have to start in the future. So I can't enter a VideoPlus+ number for a programme that's already started. In fact it clears all the data if you put an "incorrect" time in, so you have to set all your timers to start at least two minutes into the future to account for the time it takes to enter the data, and the possibility of a rollover in the meantime
* It has a counter, but no "stop" facility. So I have to watch it counting down, then hit the stop key myself. Sounds simple, but in practice can quickly end up as a game of "Oh damn, too far. Forward. Hmmm.... what's that on TV... Oh damn, too far. Backwards...."
Yes, I sent a letter to Sony - just a request for them to pass some suggestions on to their UI design team. I got a reply which essentially said "We market a range of products with different capabilities, so you should have bought a more expensive one in order to get the things you want in a VCR". Which is fair enough, except that these are not the sort of things that are obvious until you've been using the device for a while.
Conclusion: I still mostly use the cheap VCR for recording, because it's so much easier to set up timers. The Sony gets used for playback of pre-recorded stuff, where stereo is more important.
I could, of course, give plenty of other examples. It's a general trend, and not just restricted to A/V equipment. It's more due to laziness on the part of the UI designers, or cutbacks from the management.
In my perfect world, the TV would have an ethernet port, optional DHCP server, and a web browser. Everything else (video, hi-fi, microwave, fridge...) would have a built in web server. Instant network control. Instant full-screen setup pages. No more need to set the clock on the hi-fi using multi-function buttons in a special mode on a 4 digit 7 seg display.
Plus I could ssh into my network to set the video from work when I forgot in the morning.