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Comcast Drops Microsoft
Frosty Piss writes "Comcast plans to drop Microsoft's television software and on-screen program guide from its digital cable boxes. The cable company will replace the Microsoft technology with GuideWorks software — Comcast is a part owner of GuideWorks. Comcast has been the lone cable company in the US using Microsoft technology for set-top boxes, and only in the state of Washington, Microsoft's back yard." The Microsoft offering has a solid presence in Latin America. The company is no longer trying very hard to market it here at home.
I had no idea MS was to blame for that god awful cable box software. I thought that was Motorola's doing.
... nuff said
Nevertheless, good riddance
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
...I've heard that the COMCAST software sucks. It's more or less an out of the frying pan into the fire situation. And to be honest, given their incredibly lousy customer service, what makes you think they're going to develop reliable software? Or software that will allow you to do anything -more- useful than the Microsoft offering? A quick google search showed as much (if not more) complaining about Guideworks on -current- comcast boxes versus the Microsoft software.
Looking at the Guideworks website, it looks like the same crap that was part of the reason I dropped Comcast months ago. This really isn't a big deal as the Microsoft switch affects a relatively small portion of people compared to how many Comcast serves. The thing is, Guideworks software is a pile of crap, the UI is absolutely horrible, and I had mandatory updates to it remove useful functionality and even lose some of the shows I had saved on the box's hard drive. But really, the user interface is as bad as it gets. It's unresponsive, randomly locking up for seconds and sometimes even a full minute on end, and then all of a sudden all the buttons you pressed during the lockup (thinking maybe you just didn't press that remote button hard enough...) queue up and are executed immediately causing even more problems.
Comcast was supposedly talking to Tivo about replacing their Comcast/Guideworks software with the much loved Tivo software. Where is that?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
This probably has less to do with Microsoft's guide sucking as it has to do with Comcast already having an on-screen guide software suite. For something so critical, one would think that Comcast would have been 100% behind the home-grown option.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I wonder what it shows when it's late and between channels...
Well, I hope the transition to the new software enables comcast to not make the same mistakes as most other digital set top boxes. Let's see if I can remember all my complaints.
- widescreen support somewhere between zero and none
- menu tree overly deep and wide, with a bad bad case of feature creep
- distracting ad banners in every corner of the screen
- video-on-demand jerky and unresponsive to ff/rew/pause buttons
- huge fonts means you can only see listings for 1 hour and 5 channels on the screen at once
- huge overscan margins which is not required for LCD or plasmas anyway
- horrible play-skool color choices for the buttons, lists, menus, overlays.
- cheesy 3-D looking buttons that look like windows 3.1 or motif 1.0 at best
- showing channel number and station ID in pop-up or overlays instead of spending $5 to display it in LED's on the front of the box
- button only remotes--how about a jog/shuttle scroll wheel like VCR's used to have
- remotes with 60 buttons of which you only use 8 most of the time
- the 1/4 size live picture when you pull up the menus or the guide is cute, except for those rare occasions when you're trying to read the menus or the guide
- the box that supports DD5.1 or component video costs way more than it should...you can get the same outputs on a $30 DVD player at wal-mart, why should it cost so much more on a STB
- how about an open protocol so i can access the cable feed from myth tv directly instead of having to use an IR emitter or cable card
- maybe not charge so much for PPV movies since they're $1/day to rent at Kroger
- when you do the triple-play, how about not sending me two or three boxes, how about just one box with a telephone jack, an ethernet port, and component video jacks?
- why do you have to have some guy come out to "install" this thing when I can connect cables together just fine myself
- how about HD actually being the same bandwidth as what I can get for FREE from rabbit ears instead of compressing the living daylights out of it
- set top box can't actually set on top anymore if you have a flat panel TV, how about some brackets or let it look decent mounted in a vertical position
- record button should be able to start my VCR (or should have 10 years ago) like directv receivers can, not just change the channel
- even if the STB was flawless and seamless to use, the actual content is crap. i swear i spend more time using the cable modem to view stuff on youtube than i do watching TV.
Cancel or Allow?
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Perhaps if you cared more about customers than promoting your anti-Microsoft agenda, you'd realize that the Comcast software is, without reservations, worse in every way that the Microsoft software. This is a bad thing for consumers all around. Comcast will now have one less input on how the system might be improved for consumers. You may consider the evil of Microsoft absolute, but Comcast is even more evil when it comes to "serving" their customers.
He won't say exactly what patents they are, but they probably include things like "Method and apparatus for sitting on your couch eating cheesy poofs while watching television" and "Method and apparatus for displaying television programs which contain blocks of programming separated by commercials."
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Yesterday my Comcast provided cable modem died. I stopped by the local office after work and exchanged it for a new one.
It did not just plug-and-play with my router, I had to plug it directly into a computer first and run their configuration. So, I plugged it into my powerbook. I expected trouble when the Comcast website came up telling me I would have to download some software, but when I clicked the button, the file it downloaded was actually a mac file--wow.
After unpacking the install program a warning message popped up telling me I needed to use Internet explorer to continue the configuration. It then installed IE 5.something, which promptly froze up and died.