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Firmware Upgrades For Everything
eggoeater writes "Forbes Magazine has an article discussing how more portable electronics are not only suggesting firmware upgrades, but requiring them in order to get all the features! Apparently the new Lyra A/V Jukebox will sometimes display a message stating that 'this feature will be available in future upgrades.' In addition, the article states that some patches are difficult and dangerous depending on the component. Some cell phone patches require a proprietary cable ($25) that will then wipe out your phone book. This raises concerns over alienating users that aren't tech-savvy and how this could affect perceptions of portable electronics as a whole."
The concept is called time to market, the price you pay is quality. This is what happens when a society values profits over sustainability. The more faceless, the less accountable. One million marketers can't be wrong. Dude, where's my shares?
Yes, I am cynical.
Let's start the discussion by raising the concern that if the majority of users aren't tech savvy and society is dominated by technology, doesn't this sound like a new dark age? History has shown that when the peasant mass is uneducated, the church and monarchy rule. Are we not heading in this direction again? Technology being the new "power"? How long until the masses catch up and stop being screwed?
If this culture develops in this industry, then it will be easy for big business to force customers to accept 'improvements' that they would rather be without.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Sure it's dangerous, sure it can screw up your brand new DVD Player or home theatre system, so why not take it to a professional? Competitive rates assured!
Or let the luddites live without the 'features'. Face it, that's why we became techies in the first place, to profit from everyone else's technophobia.
and maybe you would get it right without needing to "update/mess about with" every 3months
the consumer is not your beta tester
"This raises concerns over alienating users that aren't tech-savvy and how this could affect perceptions of portable electronics as a whole."
Frankly, if I'm being forced to pay $25 for a cable to do necessary upgrades, you're going to alienate me whether I'm tech savvy or not. Especially if the 'unavailable' features were advertised as part of the item in question.
This is just crap, if they wanna do this they should lower the retail price, then charge the difference by feature in the firmware upgrades. Who's to say they will ever release the features you already paid for...why should they since they have your money already?
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I don't know why anybody would seek a non-upgradable piece of hardware over an upgradable piece of hardware. New features through firmware updates should be quite welcome to everybody who can follow the simple precautions necessary to update.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I don't trust a feature not included with a shipping version to ever arrive. It's it not there when they ship it, I don't believe them when they say it'll be available in a "downloadable patch"; usually, it appears first in the next major version of software, for which you have to pay - which means that they have every incentive to not make it available for free, because that feature then becomes an upgrade-motivating differentiator.
Likewise with firmware in consumer goods. I don't trust them - if it's not there when I buy, I suspect they'll ship it in a "deluxe" version before they let me upgrade my DVD player/blender/mp3 player to get the same feature.
Is for someone to keep a good site with older versions that allows for reverse-engineering and selection of old and new features!
person will not tolerate it. If you advertise a feature, and it doesn't work, it's only a matter of time before you are sued.
/. come from a tme in the computer era where you had to 'fiddle' with stuff to get it to work, IRQ conflicts spring to mine.
many of us on
When a feature in your blender won't work becasue of a bug, people will stop buying your blender. It should just work without the user knowing anything about the inner workings.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
New features through firmware updates should be quite welcome to everybody who can follow the simple precautions necessary to update.
Except that the customer has in most cases already paid for these features. At that point, who is to say these "features" won't turn into vaporware.
For example: I spent a day and a half trying to upgrade the firmware on an otherwise useless SMC "PCI" NIC, the SMC EZ Connect 802.11b 2602W v.1, not to be confused with the v.2 or v.3 models with completely different chipsets. I say "PCI" because the NIC is actually the 2632W v.1 PCMCIA NIC in a PLX "riser."
Thanks only to Jun Sun's mini-HOWTO and "unofficial" firmware caches on the Web, I was able to upgrade the station firmware. Unfortunately, this did not result in the features I needed.
If vendors begin requiring consumers to flash firmware regularly, it needs to come out of the "underground" and be explained by the vendors. I'd also like to see DOS boot-disk-based firmware upgrade tools, like Dell's BIOS flash disks. I didn't like turning to Windows to run SMC's update program. (Linux and DOS attempts failed with this particular NIC.)
Thanks to the openap-ct project's Linux floppy I was able to use prism2_srec to flash a different NIC, though.
Helevius
Overlooked in this is that when you connect your product to the 'net to download new firmware, the product could have the ability to be able to upload as well. Who knows what the firmware in your stereo, or TV may report back about your use?
Sounds like vaporware has moved from the soft relm to the hard relm. If the missing "feature" was advertized then I think there's a case for a lawsuit. Then again, I bought my PDA partly on the strength of a feature that is missing -- with no firmware upgrade available. Unless there's a class action, I'm screwed and they know it. But unless there's a fix, I'll never buy their crap again. If what this article says is true, then it's a short-term trend that will get the companies long-term problems.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Although firmware upgrades could be a very positive thing for users, providing ways to customise and improve a device, they're also open to abuse. Apart from being a means to ship an inferior product earlier, this opens up an opportunity to control the consumer by messing with the normal product purchasing process. By doing this, the traditional rules of competition can be blurred enough for a company to succeed where it otherwise would not have.
The software industry has featured this idea for a while in a few forms: you buy the software, but then you don't really own it because you are just licenced to use it. Or you buy the software, but have to apply a critical update that comes with a licence change that changes it into something you wouldn't have purchased in the first place. Now, the hardware manufacturers can get in on the act, throwing the old rule book out the window. Companies will do anything to get ahead if they think they can get away with it. They're not people and have no sense of wrong or right - just a sense of profit or loss.
One of the things that people need to realize is that simple handheld pieces of electronics are getting more and more complex in their features and functions. And as they do this they will start to require just as much maintenance and patchwork as a regular desktop computer does. True, knowledge is power, and I watch all the time as my parents get frustrated with technology, but if you take it slow, read the help files and pay attention, people would be a lot better off. Things like AOL and Microsoft make people dumb, they need to realize that not all computer processes are automated and that sometimes things take some investigation. :)
This is when people have an onus to go out and buy some crap to give you, and you have the onus to do the same for them, before you can even visit for tea.
And, of course, the "present" is usually presented personally, and its kinda in bad taste to not open it up and fawn over it for a while. I mean, you don't really wanna hurt their feelings after they went through all that mad rush to get it for you do you? Its not like you personally have had to experience the same frustration yourself trying to hold up your end of the bargain. So, you open it and drool over it awhile so their feelings won't get hurt. Presto! Opened product!
Now, to add injury to it, if your donor finds out you returned the thing they so "carefully selected" for you, their feelings might be hurt. You wouldn't want that, would you?
Yep, a marketer's dream market.
Damm, I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge!
But before you bah-humbug me as such, I will say I think the holidays are for sharing as much time as you can with others, as our busy worklives, accounted for by the minute, doesn't leave much time for social interaction with loved ones. Its just the horning in of others with the fiduciary interest of milking this occasion for all its worth that irritates me so.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
By the same token, devices that upgrade well will be noted by the buying public and purchased over devices that do not.
Although the article has a negative spin on the art of upgrading, I can see lots of positive aspects as well: new formats emerge could well be addressed with upgrades, security holes could be filled, etc. However, the device *must* do it well!
- I bought a 4x DVD burner less than a year ago and had to firmware flash it. I can get an 8x now for less.
- Firmware flashing an 802.11g laptop wireless card went wrong and broke wireless networking on my laptop. As I hadn't set a system restore point, I had to re-install windows.
- I rushed out and bought SuSE Linux 9.0 for AMD64 as soon as it came out. Had to wait months for drivers to support my SATA drives and the onboard ALN on my MoBo.
I'm done.Video jukeboxes... I'll wait until trailer-park mamas are trampling each other at Walmart to get the $35 Christmas special model made by Kwok-tek or some other manufacturer you never heard of before.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
You bring out the greatest product in the world in a bad time period, say right after christmas rather than before, then your target group has already spent their money and won't really be interested in any sort of mass spending for a while to come, by which point your product will be old and considered(whether it is or not) obsolete so you'll have to at the very least drop the price substantially to sell it.
On a slightly unrelated note, anyone notice this doesn't happen to computer software anymore. I'm not even talking about things like Diablo I which use a game of the year award to hang onto full price for something like 5 years, I'm talking about regular software, the discount stuff from earlier seasons I used to buy and enjoy when I was in high school has seemingly disappeared. Wonder what happened, do old games still sell well at that price?
This is hardware in software style and i dont like it, not one bit. Hardware have up until pretty recently been fairly free from these kinds of problems. If i buy a product i assume its tested and works. If it dont work i just return it and i wont spend any time fixing something that was broken when i bought it. I dont like to become an engineer on the behalf of the company that got my money.
Software has been sold with insane conditions that people take the responsibility off of the manufacturer but that is because software has been treated as art and not as real products. Hardware on the other hand do not have those conditions so when you buy something and it doesnt work, return it. The only way to remedy this problem is if enough people stay away from companies following the path of almost ready hardware. If its broke, they should fix it, not us.
HTTP/1.1 400
It's OK to use the microprocessor in order to produce high tech devices... but they must be simple enough to operate as a refrigerator: plug it in, and you have cold beer. When you add a bunch of useless features, you add a bunch of bugs... and the average customer don't want to buy something that needs constant attention in order to see if its working OK or if it needs some sort of upgrade. It'll just look for technical assistance if it stops working. I think that companies must focus in producing reliable and simple customer devices, even if they have some sort of high tech "brain". The cellphones are a bad example: all of them have software bugs... some of them even reduce the overall lifetime of the gadget, and this is just turning worse...
As a techy I agree with you in concept but no matter what we do we are NEVER going to change Joe Sixpack. This is where it falls on the software engineers and the hardware engineers to design better. As our technology becomes more complicated (and more heavily depended upon) it should become more transparent, not require more unnecessary technical reading for the user.
The true beauty of technology should be judged in its apparent simplicity.
Quack, quack.
As the previous poster said, you either try to be first, or your product needs to be 10 times better than the competition.
The problem is, not everyone can be great; most people are just average. Same goes for organizations; most are just going to be average (read: crappy), so they don't really have a hope of putting out a 10x better product. So instead they go for time-to-market and try to make more money that way.
The second part of the problem is with consumers: rather than wait around for the 10x better product, they line up to buy the first product out the gate, no matter how crappy it is. The companies with crappy products have figured this out, and now they're exploiting it.
What can we do about this? Almost nothing. Unless you can invent a mind-control device that telepathically reprograms everyone in society to be careful consumers who demand the highest in quality, we're pretty much stuck with our fellow citizens being shortsighted idiots. Individually, all we can do is learn from their mistakes, and be very careful about our purchases. Exercise caution and patience; don't buy anything on a whim, or without careful research for anything over $50 or $100. And don't become an "early adopter" of anything. By doing this, you'll end up saving yourself a lot of time and money in the long run.
I guess it depends on how you define "Evil." If by evil you mean they are willing to screw many individuals for their own profit, then most corporations are indeed evil. If you mean they are willing to use superior market share to destroy competition (thus hurting "consumers," who are really just individuals), then some are evil (I'm not convinced most, just a fairly large number).
/.. Simply because someone holds an opinion different from yours does not make them wrong; nor does your naive analysis of the corporate economy of America make you wrong. (Our economy is Capitalist like the Soviet Union was Communist-- that is, in name only.)
If by evil you mean allow others to die so they can profit, then a slightly smaller number are evil.
The point is, there is some definition of "evil" for which a lot (if not most) corporations are evil.
My definition is simple: if a corporation is willing to harm others in its pursuit of profit, it is evil. By this definition, quite a few are evil. Since this is condoned (and encouraged!) by our government, it seems to get worse.
Now, you can argue that corporations don't make these decisions, individuals do, but that is simply prevarication. Groups of people will do things indivduals will not; this makes the group culpable. (Now, defining the individuals within the group may be difficult.)
So how do you as an individual get around this? Easy, instead of rushing in to buy something and then whining about it later, read some objective reviews of the products you buy, talk to people (either in the real world or online) about them, and lastly take all the advertising you see with a grain of salt.
This is excellent advice, and I certainly agree with it; but that doesn't change the economic reality that sometimes, there is only Hobson's Choice, at best. In some areas, if you want phone service, you must use the single provider in your area. This is just one example among many.
Further, consider how people have been reduced to "consumers." Between that and, "worker," that is our role in society-- to work, and to consume. Who profits most from this? I'll bet you dollars to donuts (Mmmmm.... Krispie Kreme....) it isn't the individual.
I don't take exception to your arguments. I take exception to the reference to the "uninformed opinions" so popluar here on
Just because you are right about unthinking consumerism driving shoddy workmanship in the electronic gadgets sector does not negate the evil nature of many corporations. Enron did not happen in a void.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I don't know about the previous guy, but I consider myself competent-to-very competent in most of the above, except cooking (which isn't really necessary anyway, as long as you can make yourself simple meals and such), and fashion (which isn't important if you're male).
The problem with most people is that, as the previous poster said, they're mentally lazy. They just learn enough to do their job (and usually only adequately then), and outside of that they don't want to learn anything at all. So when something goes wrong, they're completely helpless. The toilet breaks, and they have to call the plumber and pay $100. The car breaks, and they have to go to a mechanic and pay $1500 because he tells them they need all kinds of things replaced which don't really need to be, but they don't know any better. They don't know anything about finances, so they buy all kinds of crap with credit cards and pay huge interest fees, never save any cash, then lose their job and they're suddenly out on the street.
What people should try to do is become knowledgable, and hopefully competent, in most areas of life that they have to deal with (house repair, auto repair if you own a car, law, finances, etc.), so that they can take care of themselves instead of being helpless and easily duped.
I don't think that the general public wants to be lied and cheated. They want features, yes, but they want to actually get those features. The current "it's normal and expected to get shafted" situation is not normal, and not what that public was asking for.
In fact, it's the textbook study of why society needs laws, and why they have to be applied. Because otherwise what happens is that the crooks create a pressure on everyone else to be a crook too.
E.g., if you let some merchants sell contraband or counterfeit goods, it will create a pressure on the other merchants to start selling contraband or counterfeit too. Otherwise their prices won't be competitive. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others in how much of their merchandise is from dubious sources.
The same happens here. Once a company is allowed to cut costs by shipping non-functional products, it just puts a pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Because otherwise someone who actually spends the time to finish and thoroughly debug a product, can't compete with the snake oil peddlers on either price or time to market. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others on cutting down quality.
That kind of thing doesn't go away by itself. Never did, never will. You need a legal system to stop it.
And saying that everyone needs to waste countless hours of their life trying to avoid getting screwed is, if you'll pardon my saying so, completely idiotic. It's as idiotic as saying that your only recourse to spam should be sorting your mails yourself by hand.
There are laws and courts of law for this kind of thing. If I sell you a house which isn't even built yet, you'd sue the pants off me. If I sell you a car, except what I can give you is just two wheels and a spoiler, you'd sue the pants of me. No "EULA" will let me say it's OK to shaft you, in any other industry.
It's time the same applied to software too. (Yes, including firmware.)
Because this kind of generalized thievery and snake oil peddling is already too high a cost for society as a whole. Not only hundred billions of dollars per year are lost to basically legalized scamming in this industry. We're also talking billions of hours total shaved off people's lives, where they have to work around bugs or to read reviews to make sure their new product will even work at all.
Those hours by themselves are too high a cost.
A murderer can be put to death for... what? Shortening someone's life by, say, 20 years? That's approximately 20 * 365 * 24 = 175,200 hours.
Well, these scammers cost society as a whole a thousand times more hours off everyone's lives. Each year.
Now I'm not asking to actually give those marketroids a death by firing squad. But throwing some of them in state jails would be a damn good start.
Either way, again: history has shown again and again that this kind of thing needs laws. And it needs them actually applied.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Technology is advancing exponentially. Cell phones, PDA's, MP3 and video jukeboxes, laptop computers, PC's, Televisions, VCR's, DVD players, Home Stereo, wireless networks, video surveillance, walkie Talkies... and more are all converging into new paradigm products. The bleeding edge is always bloody, messy, and made for us geeks and wannabe geeks. It is going to take a while for the market to figure out exactly what the average consumer wants in their easy to use, fool proof, idiot proof, gadgets. The Tivo is a great example. So is the Ipod. These are examples of refined technology made for a clearly defined purpose-and made as idiot proof and as user friendly as possible. And remember, Ipod dominates the market for the single reason you are all upset with unfinished products: The Ipod is a finished product. The companies that are going to grab market share and hold it, are the ones that finally do make their products finished, stable, easy to use, AND stylish.
www.wisdomproject.net The open source think tank.
just like they wrote the sw for the mars rover while it was enroute, you can do the same while they are mfg and shipping a cd player.
it takes time to get to the store from its manufacture location, they go stale on the shelf.
Think about it... user buys product now, with a hot new feature promised within a short time via firmware download.
... but the software running on the computer can disable it, so you can't get a perfect digital copy of that music file you're playing.
... Whenever a company does something like this, dollars are involved....
e -people-dependant-on-them's worth.... ..."You can NOT leave the magic!"
Now, three months later, the download that enables that feature comes out, but lo and behold - the download also includes a bunch of "features" you don't want - such as DRM or embedded advertising.
It's happened before... my sound card (A SB Audigy) has a digital 5.1 output
Or, take the case of ReplayTV - most people don't know or realize this, but the OS in the ReplayTV can be set up to display advertising on the pause screen - it was only used once IIRC, but there's nothing saying that the owners of ReplayTV can't do it again. The ReplayTV is particularly nasty in this since the files that run the ReplayOS are in fact digitally signed so you can't "tinker" with the operating system.
What am I afraid of? The general public is getting used to paying monthly fees to have things that were previously "free" - Cable TV, for example. Radio will probably end up going the same route - check out XM and Sirius Radio. Now, imagine if you bought a hardware device - for example a PDA. Right now, I can go to Best Buy and drop a few dollars on a Palm Tungsten something-or-other... and it's _mine._ I don't have to pay Palm one red cent over that initial purchase I made if I don't want to.
Now imagine 10 years from now - you go to Best Buy to pick up that PDA. But now, instead of paying a few hundred dollars once for a Palm Pilot, you now have to pay to purchase the unit, PLUS subscribe to some sort of subscription service if you want your PDA to, for example, connect to your PC.
Already the world of personal gadgetry is heading this way. Check out the "Get it now!" service from everyone's favorite cellphone carrier. You have to pay to download a game, PLUS you have to pay a monthly fee (if the author of the game wants you to) - and many cell phones now have the ability for the carrier to "turn off" certain features on various cell phones.
The same thing goes for my ReplayTV - two exact same models hardware-wise - the exact same software inside! Yet, on the newer "5500" series units, two features (commecial skip and Internet Video Sharing) are disabled. One option bit in the internal "registry" turns these features off. Now, this was in response to a settlement with Hollywood, but what is to prevent hardware manufacturers from doing the same thing for profit? Or, charging you a monthly fee to enable certain features - if you don't pay, the features are disabled! It's not like a service is being provided, since all you are paying for is a little "command" to be echoed to your device to enable whatever it is you're doing - similar to cable boxes of old that could have their IR receivers disabled by the cable company if you weren't renting a remote from them - so you couldn't use any universal remotes for free.
The long and the short of it
Just my pissing-and-moaning-about-companies-trying-to-mak
-RickTheWizKid