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Early Adopters Experiencing More Bugs?
As the pressure to push out new technology product continues, early adopters are continuing to experience trouble. A reader wrote to mention a USA Today article about some recent new product problems. From the article: "Philips Electronics revealed Friday that it is recalling 11,800 plasma television sets. The Ambilight TVs were sold in the USA from June 2005 to January 2006 for $3,000 to $5,000. Faulty capacitors inside the sets can spark. Nine incidents have been reported, but retardant material inside the TVs has prevented any fires, spokeswoman Katrina Blauvelt says. The problem is not expected to affect other brands, because it is a part related to Philips' unique Ambilight feature, which casts a colored glow on the wall behind the TV."
This Ambilight technology is off the hook! Look at that red glow and flame effect it has on my wall! Technology is amazing! Now movies look completely real and vivid. This is the full theatre experience--I'm glad I paid $3k-$5k for this. I don't know how Philips does it but only Ambilight TVs give you the authentic feel like you really are trapped inside a burning building. And look, the flame even gives me third degree burns like a real fire
My work here is dung.
Water is believed by scientists to be wet... Film at eleven!
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"Rain is wet! details at eleven!"
Some journalist really think they need to state the obvious...
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Are they seriously suggesting that the people who are first to experience a new product or service may be statistically more likely to experience unintended side effects or consequences of a system which has only had limited & focused testing prior to it's release? Say it ain't so!
Here I was thinking that everything that has ever been done is tested, 100%, with every single possible scenario covered. Even ones the testers didn't think of. You've shattered my perfect world view!
If I were watching the wall behind my TV, I'm sure I'd like there to be something colorful and attractive there.
BUT I'M USUALLY WATCHING THE TV SCREEN!
You're risking starting a fire so that there's an attractive and colorful pattern on the wall BEHIND the TV???
Beam me up! I yield back the remainder of my post to click knobs and rabbit ears.
The problem is not expected to affect other brands, because it is a part related to Philips' unique Ambilight feature, which casts a colored glow on the wall behind the TV.
Is that colored glow before or after the capacitors blow?
"It's not a flaw - its a feature!"
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
This right after firefox 2.0 alpha is released. Some sort of joke?
Of this story, to be precise. To repeat what was said there, this has nothing to do with the actual plasma TV tech, and is purely a problem with the multicoloured lights they have round the back of the TV. Which can be turned off until you get a chance to send it off for the fix.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
It seems to me that early adopters will continue to have problems as long as consumers keep their memories short. There is undeniable pressure to get new products to market fast. This leads to shoddy engineering. Thing is, generally companies do not feel many repercussions when they screw up, because consumers do not avaoid other products from that company. Phillips will take a hit in this recall, but six months from now, it will be forgotten by the world at large and Phillips will maintain the status quo: get new shinies in the store as fast as possible.
Remember that the XBox 360 had a duff power supply? That has hardly hurt the sales of that product and you can bet nobody will associate that debacle with the upcoming release of Vista.
Maybe not *this* problem, but more and more software, hardware and services seem to be a lot of rubbish, as proper testing gets neglected in the rush to market. (Not that testing was ever that big a deal, especially in the software industry, which deosn't have quite the same problems with fire/electrical shock hazards as hardware).
in other news : the world is round .. i mean flat .. i mean .. whatever
It seems that we just accept these things now as inevitable. When products were produced, even as little as 10-20 years ago, I think they went through a much more thorough testing cycle before they were released to the public. With the advent of the Internet, expecially with software products, this idea of "release broken, patch later" just became the normal way of doing things. Since everyone running a business uses computers, this idea started creeping into products that couldn't be patched over the Internet. Of course, when companies start getting hit with the massive bills for these kinds of failures, I think we'll see the pendulum swing the other way. It's not even about massive consumer backlash anymore. (Which used to be the only motovating factor) It's simply that if Phillips has to pay a technician $30 - $50 (or more) to go onsite and replace a cheap defective part for 12,000 TV sets, they will start paying more attention to testing.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Anyone who buys a complex product that's not in very wide circulation runs the risk of getting more bugs in the system. Take kitchen appliances for example. That $6000 refridgerator that's even been in production for a few years is a lot more likely to have bugs in its operation than the $1200 one that's been around for the same amount of time. Why? Because hundreds of thousands of people buy the $1200 compared to the few thousand who bought the $6000 one. That $1200 unit has been in a lot more homes so the company has had time to better refine the product. Granted if you buy the top shelf item I imagine the manufacturer will jump through as many hoops as possible to keep your business since they did make a tidy profit off of you and want to keep you around as a future sucker... I mean customer.
Yeah, Philips is known for having products with bad caps. I've had a couple Philips DVD players stop working for this very reason. There are whole forums devoted to the issue, you think they would have found a new supplier of low ESR caps by now. In any case no more Philips for me.
I'm agneglectic, too lazy to care if there is a God.
This has been known for a long time now. Apple afficionado's call it the "Revision A Syndrome" where nobody who knows their stuff will buy a revision A. Look at the first iMacs and their hard drive and processor problems, the first iMac flat panels and their arms collapsing or the first imac G5 and their capacitors and overheating and fan noise problems. The first eMacs and their analog board problems making for half a display or the revision A G5 with their PCI and fan noise problems. Revision A 15" powerbooks had screen white blotch problems. Revision A white iBooks had some of the worst screen and logic board problems of any macbook.
But it is fixed in the end and progress continues and there are then models that are gems that are known never to give the owners any problems at all and have few issues to ever have warranty fixes. that is what early adopters are for.
watch it continue with the new revision B iMacs when they fix the intel screen problems plaguing them, or revision B macbook pros fixing the dull flickery screen and keyboard brightness problems and dying magsafe connectors and the revision B intel mac mini when they fix its overheating, DVI flickering and dying hard disc problems.
early adopters pay a price but they get what is coming before anybody else so in that case they are getting an advantage by six months and they know they are sometimes willing to pay for something not as good as later.
Hum, im wondering what fact we have discovered here?
I'm thinking someone brought one of these and is now pissed off because its got to go back. Sounds about right really as if you do buy something where the technology is so new and untested then yes, it WILL Have bugs.
My dad always used to wait awhile before buying a new vcr/hifi/dvd player, so that they could fix bugs.
Anyone want to think about all those gen1 ipods which expanded/blewup/died/lostbatterycharge/got robbed.... ?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Read AVS Forum, and hear about some of the problems people are having with their TVs. There are tons of issues out there. Plasma TVs degrade over time (years), for example. Another serious problem (in my opinion) seems to be the rear projection tv's (RPTV's) that have bulb issues (such as dlp tv). $250-$400 per bulb, and some consumers are getting blown bulbs after less than $1000 hours of use (the manufacturer specifically says something ridiculous like 6k+ hours). I want a new TV, but I'm not going to spend $3k on something than needs to be worked on or replaced within years. Also, it is ridiculous that 1080p tv's can only accept a 1080i signal through HDMI (If they say it is an 1080p tv it should take a 1080p signal).
Just remember: "The pioneers take all the arrows"
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
FTA: The problems don't necessarily mean tech firms are suddenly designing shoddy products, NPD's Baker says. But they are outsourcing more to save money..
I'm not an overly-critical person, but I think the article is FULL of juicy, one-sentence generalizations like the above.
I'd be more interested in knowing the frequency of this type of issues, the actual brand to which these things have happened (beyond Phillips' issue), and the nature of the issues.
By the way, getting service on a TV, VCR, CD, or DVD machine is interesting. Contrary to the article's statment, you'd be surprised at how many brands are actually in the food chain of a very few companies.
A Passionate Independent Musician
11,800 televisions have been sold to date. Out of these 11,800 units, 9 experiences a problem.
1. Work out the incident rate at which this faults occured.
2. Calculate how many sets Phillips would have to test before they were statistically likely to encounter this fault, prior to release.
Once you've done that, you might understand why this problem wasn't found earlier.
Early adopters experiece bugs...?
Things released from hand fall towards the ground...?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
You wrongly assumed I would read such an article. If you already have made your mind up you don't want to read something that contradicts that, do you?
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I remember my uncle once told me to never buy revision 1 versions of motherboards because they may often have issues. With the complexity other devices are taking now, it appears that this word of advice may go beyond typical computer hardware.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Stupid sensationalist headline.
/.
There is a reference to ONE product and that is generalized to EARLY adopters in general. This one product recall has moreover already been discussed on
Moreover Zonk, you fail to make a point how this is related to being "early adopters". It's not like capacitors are new technology, now is it?!
Ambilight was in many products before, this probably just was a fluke.
If you would see the original request (check DUPE), you would see the problem only relates to a limited set of production dates (uptil week 34 '05).
Then find bugs, that get fixed in later revisions of product - that later purchasers buy. So Use product first, find first bugs... what a suprise.
OK, first, of course this is the case. That's why many of you recommend that nobody adopt any .0 release, but instead wait until AT LEAST six months until after a .2 release is out. You also experience the same thing with TV shows if you watch every new series from the first episode instead of catching the first season on DVD and coming in at season 2 - you tend to only watch shows that are hits then, but you are a bit behind for a season.
However, as we all know, early adopters get a huge head start on everybody else in terms of being able to use a new technology months or years in advance. As an example, I'm an alpha tester on a new development tool that I'm convinced is going to be a smash hit. It won't even be available for a public BETA for another month, and by that time I'll have been using it for six months, banging my head against the wall on some things, but learning a lot in the process.
The other thing that EARLY adopters get out of the deal is...input, and access to the designers. The customers who adopted the new Phillips units will have much more say in future product innovation than people who come later, because the cutsomer base is smaller at the beginning, and the team is more willing to listen to the people who give them the first feedback.
RAZR and SLVR users have the coolest phones (if a bit wide), and will be the ones who experience the early product problems. SO? They're still the coolest phones.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
If I am the first to buy a product that's never been released before, there's a chance it may have more failures then someone that buys it 3 years later at half the cost? NO WAY.... What next, the sky isn't pink?
However wrong this seems, it's the way things work - the impatient ones take the blunt of bugs, issues, and difficulties in new products, allowing the version 2, 3 and 4 people to enjoy a more stable product.
I really wish it didn't have to work that way.
Upon opening Slashdot this morning i see it's business as usual:
Has early adoption gotten out of control? (Was it ever more controlled / less risky?) I don't know. I realize the article is particular to hardware, but I'm seeing the early adopter phenomenon taking on even larger scale in the form of companies like Google who release software and services in a public beta that may last for years. The eagerness of the consumer to latch on to the new and shiny is allowing the manufacturer to become lax in its R&D and internal testing. We're so ready to try out anything they can give us, there's the incentive for them to get it out the door to us as soon as they can. Both sides could be faulted equally, and there's not a clear solution to the problem.
This sig intentionally left justified.
"It seems to me that early adopters will continue to have problems as long as consumers keep their memories short."
It's not so much forgetfulness, as it is materialism. People have to have the latest technology. Keeping up with the joneses, as it were.
"Remember that the XBox 360 had a duff power supply? That has hardly hurt the sales of that product and you can bet nobody will associate that debacle with the upcoming release of Vista."
No the Xbox 360 power supply was fine. You simply needed to give it adequate cooling. You may be thinking about the Xbox power supply?
It stands to reason that a new product hasn't quite gotten all of the kinks out yet. With years of experience as an engineer this comes as no suprise.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Ambilight is a stupid gimick. We're seeing more buggy stupid gimicks. Core products actually seem more reliable.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
That's what early adopters are there for. Since actual miners' canaries in rusty cages aren't all that common nowadays, we use the world's growing supply of indiscriminate purchasers of new tech to get hit with all the fires, explosions, and genetic mutations they haven't quite worked out in the product testing labs.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
...see how things turn out, that way you won't be the sucker that bought the faulty product.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
As for Ambilight - just what is the point of that feature? It makes your wall glow? I've seen the adverts for it and it just screams gimmick. If you really want that kind of feature, hook up your own lights behind a non-Phillips plasma TV and you're done. I think more damage is done by companies denying there's a fault and being found out.. to quote Fight Club..
'If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?
You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.'
It's not just early adopters. mature products also feature their share of bugs. Frex, the code that runs one very popular news site has no mechanism in place to see whether an article posting is a duplicate of an article that was posted days or even hours earlier.
bkd
...end users will always find a new and exciting way of breaking your product or using it in a way that is wasn't designed for so these issues have to be engineered out. Now if only it would be possible to do over the air upgrades of capacitors etc :)
SolarVPS - Quality Windows and Linux Virtual Servers
You should NEVER be an early adopter of anything... technology has shown that enough over the years. Look at the first TV's, there were two standards and eventually the BBC stopped showing the standard which used hundereds of lenses, so people who went for that lost out... now the same thing is happening again with the HD-DVD/blu ray thing ... and even if you do get past that then you have to deal with bugs which haven't been worked out yet. So never adopt early, but convince others to do because early adopters are the drivers of technology and push for better products which work well... so tell your friends and family, ADOPT EARLY!
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Maybe it's just me, but new technology seems to be released with more bugs, than it used to. I bought a DVD player/HDD recorder back when they were just out, and it was something of a pest; the clock randomly reset itself, it decided to come out of standby at random moments, that sort of thing. My XBox 360 sounds like a vacuum cleaner, while more recent models apparently have a quieter drive. More to the point, the only device I've been an early adopter for, and didn't have problems, was my DS.... but it didn't come out here until months after everywhere else, so doesn't really count. Certainly, at this point I'm swearing off being an early adopter; I don't mind a bug here and there, but problems with everything I buy is really getting on my nerves...
The ambilight example seems quite a poor one, though, as it was faulty components rather than design (or so it seems from the article)...
Right? So this is not a new problem.
Best Slashdot Co
Why, when I clicked on this story before there were any comments, it said "Nothing to see here, please move along." Early adopter bug!
...and am now considering buying an XBOX
an original one
not a 360
and playing Halo
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I'm still debating whether to go for a car with an internal combustion engine. However, now that they've almost ironed all the bugs out do you think I should wait for electric cars 1.10?
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Of course you are correct that just setting a light behind the TV is not terribly difficult, however some people do like to have nice clean rooms without a lot of cables and or extra equipment floating around, thus their tendancy to buy one of these TVs.
Shawn's Tech Articles
Well as an engineer, I'm certain you're aware that as our design and manufacturing technology has improved. The degree of overengineering has decreased markedly. New technology has also allowed for smaller designs. All fine and good, but it also means that our products are less tolerant of deviations, and overall have a shorter lifetime. For example back in the day a plastic part may be thicker and heavier to compensate for various factors, while the same part now can be made thinner, lighter, and out of a different material, but be less tolerant of lifes little "trials".
--
The "are you a script" word for today is cheaper.
This is all about rush-to-market. Companies don't want to be best, they want to be first. "We need to get it on the market NOW. Who cares about a few bugs? Besides, consumers are used to buying crap, they won't care."
The last part of that statement is true. Most consumers would rather buy a piece of crap for $39.99 than something of high quality for $59.99. Consumers think that a "good" item is one that is cheap and will break in 6 months or a year.
Until people start expecting quality, crap will be the norm and bugs will be rampant.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Early adopters are always unpaid and unsupported beta testers. Any car geek knows that the best time to buy is just before the "new model", as the old one finally has most problems fixed. Electronics are no different. Wait until the new HD/BLU players come out, and a "bug" causes random "player revocation" hahahahahahahahaha!
That's what I don't get, though. How many more examples do we need of companies that innovated something being ground into dust by the Johnny-Come-Latelys? Do they even teach anything in business school anymore, or do the teachers and students just sit around rubbing their hands together in greedy anticipation?
You need bugs? Just look at any new OS release.
I won't touch Vista until the first service pack has been released.
...but what a fscking Dupe! I am not the most adiment reader of SlashDot, but daym! If even I can tell, something is seriously wrong! :(
WTF? Early adopters see more bugs. I'm stunned. You mean if you buy the very first run of a new product it may not be as good as say, once they've had a few thousand of them on the street and gotten service calls? Really?
Hello? What part of "Bleeding Edge" are they not getting here?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I beta test software and hardware for a few companies, I am continually stunned at the point many manfucaturers say their product is good enough for release. Especially in the realm of PC hardware, sound and video cards for example, often have serious issues..."we'll fix it in driver revisions later"...and in the process piss off loads of customers while they are waiting for it.
it's all about meeting a deadline, very little about product quality. The PM doesn't want a project of his/hers behind schedule, the marketing is ready, and pretty boxes and manuals are all printed..."ya the product has a couple bugs, but so what, look at the cool box, and besides, I met the deadline."
dB Masters
... this just in ... earlier today in yards all across America their were signs of discontent among songbirds of all types. Spoke one red-tipped blackbird - "Geez! You would think that getting up early would entitle me to a nice fresh fat worm ... well I did get that but the dang thing was so dirty I just had to throw it up. Luckily the little ones were around and just gobbled it up after me but still you would think the worms would at least have the courtesy to bathe before I came calling ..."
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
No, just radiation burns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
"You should NEVER be an early adopter of anything..."
Guess all those early adopters of the Trojan Condom with ribbed ESP are now screwed.
Never buy a car in the first three years of that model's production.
The Chevy Vega was so bad that by the time they worked the design flaws out (too small a crankcase coupled with a leaky headgasket and too small a radiator) they couldn't sell them any more.
The "1st 3 years of production" rule has been around as long as I remember, and I'm over 50.
It only makes sense that it would apply to other machines as well.
I've been present at a meeting where Philips promoted patents on software. The arguments testified tremendous brutality. I'm sorry to say that I wasn't prepared to counter such arguments. I sat opposite to some guy from the University of Eindhoven. After a nod from one of the Philips people, he made a statement to support Philips' position. I was appalled.
As a Dutchman I say: Please don't buy Phiilps.
How much is marketing to blame? Now days with the big hype around new releases (be it hardware or software), the cost of missing a delivery date can be immense. In the Philips case, I know there were both print and TV ads around the launch of the Ambilight technology; ads which were in development months in advance, and specific media buys that had to tie in...
;)
One solution, obviously more easily accomplished in software, is release it broken then have a patch that can live update. In a non-software sense, this was done with the film "The New World" last year. It was released in some theaters to get some of the Christmas movie income, as well as to make it eligible for Oscar nominations, but then the film was pulled and re-released a couple weeks later with 19 minutes cut out by the director. (And someone is bound to bring up the idea of Han shooting first being a "bug" fixed by Lucas in later releases.
This sig intentionally left justified.
I used to dabble in electronics and from time to time, companies would simply produce a bad batch of capacitors. Unfortunately, you can't really tell if they're bad (unless they simply don't work at all or have the wrong value) until they fail. I don't know that this is the problem, but this can happen in mid-production, just getting a new batch of capacitors that just happen to be bad. It wouldn't matter if it were an early version or late version in that case.
Again, I don't know that that's the case here, and to be sure, bad batches of capacitors, at least in my experience, aren't terribly common...
I hate kids.
I still have my first DVD player. It was from SOny's first line of players. THere was one for $700 that had a Dolby digital decoder built-in, and a $500 one that just had the digital out with out a built-in decoder to separate the channels.
Anyway, this DVD player plays perfectly still, almost 10 years later. In fact, it will play more scratched disks than any other player I have had. My only complaint is it is a little bulky. I have seen many later models come and go (out to the trash can) since I bought this one. But maybe I shouldn't be that surprised. Paying $500 for a DVD player, I should hope they didn't go cheap on the electrical components.
. We are all suckers for junk.
Personally, I'm waiting a few more years before they work the bugs out of these new-fangled capac-i-tors...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
they've fixed this problem.... just build your tv from cvs
No tell me it isn't so! I never would have thought of that. Jeez common sense went the way of the dodo it seems.
The use of the phrase "early adopters" seems to be an attempt to shift the blame/responsibility for faulty products onto the consumer.
These are products already released to the general market as fully working, not private betas sold under appropriate terms.
As such there should be laws in place to ensure manufacturers are legally obliged to step-up and deal with the problems to the satisfaction of the consumer.
Test pilots have more accidents than airline pilots!
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I think I may have figured out what the problem really is that the article was trying to get at. The problem is that the high end and early adopter markets have merged. And that's probably not a good thing for a lot of people who want high-end stuff, but not necessarily cutting edge. I'd say that this is mainly a result of the emphasis of features more than quality.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Bart: Dad, why did you buy the first hover car ever made? Didn't you know it'd take time to work out the kinks.
Homer: I know, it's a hover car!
Early adopters experience more bugs.
Leading swiss researchers have also come to the dramatic conclusion that electronics break down all the freaking time. In other breaking news (*rimshot*), young people are believed to have less experience than old farts.
This shouldn't be surprising that new gadgets break down and/or kill their owners. Part of it has to do with the mad dash to release the newest gadget and beat your competitors to market. Part of it has to do with staffing practices, hiring young dumb cheap kids (and by kids I mean inexperienced graduates) who screw up.. driving manufacturing costs down to increase profits. Why hire a 90$/hr engineer when a corn-fed teenager will do it for 20$ ? The real cost of mediocrity goes to the end-user; as long as the TV/computer/dvd player outlasts the 90-day warranty who gives a crap ? That's the corporate mentality that's ruining the biz.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I'm considering buying a PlayStation, and playing FF7. I used to be an early adopter... but then I ran out of money, so I missed the last ten years of technology. I am trying to catch up in some places, though: I just got an iPod nano yesterday, quite a shift...
I tried to burn one of the 'wooden' particle board cabinets while burning a brush pile and what ever the chemicals used in it they'd put the fire out. It took diesel fuel to make it burn. This was a Zenith from the 80s or so.
I've seen several brands over the years do insane things. One very old philips actually managed to burn through the bottom cabinet but what ever was in that particle board smothered the flame. This was a 70s cabinet I think. It still had the steel chassis but was 100 percent solid state.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty