Why should DVR be this way?
Did you ever have one of those times when you asked, “How did this stuff ever get to produced?”
Perhaps you were looking at GM’s infamous “green light indicates that your headlights are on… except in some models, where it indicates that they are off.”
Or Mercedes’ “ha-ha, tricked you, that’s the cruise control stalk, not the turn signal.”
Or the mismatched tail-lights of the Chrysler Sebring.
Or the gas line routing on several years of slant sixes.
Today, my wonder takes me to the joys of telephone and television, two things which used to be very simple. If you wanted a telephone, you went to your Bell, and most of the time, they’d set you up with a phone that always worked, day in and day out, with very little confusion. If something did go wrong, unless you had NYNEX, they’d probably fix it right away with an apology, the first time you asked, without making you press 30 buttons and give your phone number six times. Or cable TV, which used to be pretty simple… get a cable-ready TV and plug it in, and or a cable-ready box and plug it into the TV.
We recently had Verizon FIOS. This is a fiber optic system designed for incredibly high speeds. For TV, we had a DVR supplied by Verizon. It was a real piece of work; the first two self-destructed, the second one from a bad hard drive. The third one was OK if you rebooted it now and then, and didn’t mind a frequent and unpredictable pause while it thought about things. The Internet access was very fast when it worked, and when it wasn’t very slow. Ironically, we ended up dumping Verizon for two reasons – they’re $80/month more than Cablevision’s “triple play,” which is more than I used to spend on cable and Internet access combined (come to think of it, it’s more than I pay now, too), which is a lot to spend each year. The other reason was they couldn’t fix some telephone programming issues, after repeated efforts. (I DO mean repeated, over and over and over again, wasting hours of my time.)
For reasons I never understood, the Verizon people never felt they should test the “repairs” they made. They insisted everything was fine because, well, they’d fixed it, right?
So we switched to Cablevision, and it was mainly easy. The phone worked right away, though I had to make two calls to get the caller ID set up right – we’re not Sea Board Marketing and never have been. The Internet access feels faster than Verizon’s, though it isn’t; there’s less lag time. For large files, it’s slower; for small files, it’s faster. But the DVR…
Ironically, just as Verizon failed us mainly as a phone company, Cablevision is failing us as a TV provider. Their DVR, a Scientific Atlanta 8300HD, is absurdly designed. You can’t restrict the channels to your favorites; you can’t NOT move up/down through certain channels. You can’t restrict their guide to your favorites. (You can, in TiVO and Verizon). And, while supposedly you can program it from the Web, that feature is broken for us. It’ll be fixed, we’re told, between now and two days from now.
There’s more. We should be able to set the DVR to record in standard-def to preserve the hard drive. We should be able to tell it, as we did the Verizon box, to record five minutes before and after a program, because TV stations keep starting and ending late to annoy DVR users (at least, we assume that’s why). There’s no 30-second or 1-minute commercial skip. Again, these features are all available from Verizon (except programming the DVR from the Web.)
Indeed, we should be able to set all these preferences from the Web, too.
Do the designers of these things have no budgets? Or no imagination? Does nobody do usability testing? Competitive intelligence? Any sort of comparisons at all? Or is everything geared to making a pretty brochure?
There are times I really don’t understand how things like this get out, much less become the standard. (Don’t even get me started on Windows – or the MacOS!). We keep seeing superior products ignored or abandoned (Microsoft Word 5.1a and Cricket Graph 1.3.2 and 1999 Neon, we’ll always miss you!) while inferior ones are put out. We keep seeing product revisions where long-standing bugs are left standing, while useless or unwanted features are added… or where the very things people liked about a product are dropped (PT teardrop headlights) while things the owners don’t want are added (PT towel bar).
How does this stuff ever make it through? Who’s making these decisions? Is anything thinking at all, or is stuff being pumped out by reflex?
It makes me wonder.
In the meantime, I’m pricing TiVos…
I can not explain how but I am told that you can hook a Tivo to the FIOS network. I have FIOS. My only complaint is that they seem to take away channels in the lower plans only to ask you to buy a higher tier plan to get them back, specifically HD channels. They had a bunch of nice HD channels in the regular plan when we signed up. Now they want to charge more for what we used to have. I suppose I’m expected to be forgetful and not notice…
I had a guy come to the door and ask what they could do to bring me back to Comacast. My answer? Not be Comcast. I’m not going back until they quit fleecing their customers more than Verizon which has certainly been my experience.
I will say that Cablevision’s DVR has shown me that Verizon wasn’t so bad… Cablevision’s channel lineup isn’t as good, either, unless you’re into sports. I’m signing up for TiVO – they have a nice price on “refurbished” units and the cablecard is $2 a month. Free, really, because our package includes two cable boxes, and I can “borrow” the card from one of them. I’d rather not spend so much – my preference on cable would be to go back to our old Cablevision plan of $30/month. But they kept raising the rates until FIOS was the same price, so we went to FIOS. But then FIOS turned out to be very pricey…
I suspect that when our package deal runs out, I’ll end up going back to FIOS for TV and Internet, and using Cablevision for telephone! Funny the way the world works.
But Cablevision’s customer service has been pretty good. They’re easier to get to than Verizon, their web sites work, not perfectly but far better than Verizon’s complex mess, and they do what they say they’ll do.
Bob, you’ve experienced the same thing I did with Verizon. They start you on an attractive plan then immediately begin decontenting it. Sound familiar, Chrysler? Before you know it, what looked like a good deal turns into a raping. And I’ve already pontificated here on their lousy customer service.
As for the world in general, it seems that a combination of cost-cutting by the bean counters and decisions made by detached product managers and marketing people leave us wonder “What WERE they thinking?”. When was the last time a product actually EXCEEDED your expectations and left you “delighted”? These days, it seems that happens far less frequently, if at all. Features and quality you want, but can’t have, at any price.
A good example is the major appliance business. In my basement I have the refrigerator I bought for my first house in 1984. An 18 cu. ft. GE. It has never required repair. Still running great, but I’m wondering how much power the old dinosaur is using. It replaced an even older upright freezer that my parents handed down to me. My electircal bill dropped about $15/month by making the switch. At that time, the family was growing so, we replaced it upstairs with a more energy efficient 26 cu. ft. Frigidaire side-by-side with ice & water through the door. That was 9 years ago. I had the ice maker replaced twice on that under warranty. Never broke again after that. Who knows why? Sadly, 10 months ago it developed a refrigerant leak that was going to cost $750 to repair, or almost as much as I paid for it. In talking with the appliance repair guy, he said it used to be you could expect about 15 years out of major appliances. Today, according to him, that number has dropped to 5 years. So, washers, dryers, stoves, dishwashers, and refrigerators have a 5 year life expectancy. That’s progress? Faced with that prospect, off we went to Sears to find a replacement. After looking at a lot of refrigerators in the $2,000 range, we started wondering about that 5 year life expectancy. Amortized that’s $400/year. The $2,000 ones didn’t seem any better quality than the $1,000 models. In fact, most of the shelving and components looked identical. Had to assume that applied to the compressor and other systems. So, we went cheap and consider this a 5-year throw-away. Is everything including cars getting to that point?
Appliances? Only last week our beloved “Beer Refrigerator” which was our one-and-only, when we were first married in 1961, finally crapped out. The make was MONITOR. Compare that with the garbage now being foisted upon the public today. Then have a look at our beloved Mopars. I happen to be a fan of the Ferrari/Fishmouth look of the 1990 Concorde’s front end which is my wife’s car. But be that as it may, what ever happened to CONTINUITY? Even there, it isn’t the bean counters but some oddball in styling who threw “family resemblance” out the window. Cadillac used to have a corner on the EGG CRATE grille since 1941 but now, like every other machine on the road the front end gives the impression of a smiley face giving you the evil eye(headlights).
Incidentally, my wife’s Concorde which we bought used with 70k miles has that questionable V-6. But running Mobil-1 thru it and changing it every 1,000 miles three times seemes to have “flushed” all those teeny-tiny oil galleries and a couple of trips from Hartford, CT to NYC and back as well as routine fast runs on the interstate show no loss of oil on the dipstick.
Still, the Gawdawful corporate response to the problem of engines giving owners of the cars when they were new did one helluva lot to damage a fine car’s reputation. So who should shoulder the blame for that mess?
Here in Columbia and counties in Maryland other than Howard you will have to ask for a Cable Card. This is intentionally made to be painful by all cable companies. They are playing the same game the phone companies used to. They do not want your equipment on their networks. I keep hearing that the cable companies intentionally do what they can to discourage use of Cable Cards. Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, the lot of ‘em hate Cable Cards even though they are required by law to provide them. The format used by Verizon is QAM64 just like the other networks. The fiber is just the physical media used by the network rather than twisted pair or coax used by the other networks.
My last “exceeding expectations” experiences were with a Mac Pro and an iPod. Coincidence? I think not… there was a time when just about every car was that way – happy and unexpected surprises – the Sundance, the Neon, the PT Cruiser, and numerous minivans all had “surprise and delight” features (the term is Chrysler’s, not mine).
Oh, and I guess Default Folder fits in there. But usually it’s stuff like Dreamweaver, where they screw up the interface leaving all the bugs intact.
Moparnut, unfortunately somewhere along the way Chrysler adopted the GM & Ford attitude toward customer service. Like when my father’s ‘75 C20 454 was going through a quart of oil every 300 miles: “It’s supposed to do that.” Really? Then explain why oil is seeping passed every gasket on the engine like a waterfall?
I remember when Chrysler would even cover things out of warranty just to keep you a happy customer. In the Daimler days things changed and you suddenly had to fight with them to get things covered while still under warranty. I can only recall one time on my 2002 Jeep where they actually offered to do a caliper/rotor upgrade to alleviate a persistent rotor warpage problem. In reality, I was toward the end of a long line of customer complaints that had forced the issue, so I benefitted from their years of pain.
When it comes to that infamous V6 engine, I have to say I’d be disappointed that Chrysler didn’t step up to the problem if I was stuck with one. My brother-in-law’s 2001 Intrepid failed. But, then again, oil sludge-related failures were affecting other Chrysler engines as well as other manufacturers including Toyota. So, while a quiet design change seemed to solve the problem in later years, I still wonder what about modern engines and oil had changed to cause so many sludge-related failures across manufacturers. I also think that Chrysler found itself between a rock and a hard place. If you admit fault, then you have a lot of engines to replace and pick up the tab. Not only the 2.7, but I read a lot of complaints about latter day 5.2L and 5.9L V8s. Designs that had been around for decades. I think they evaluated the cost of doing the “right thing” or doing “the profitable thing”, and their lawyers and bean counters convinced them to do the latter.
I have to say, I applaud Toyota for recalling 3.8 million cars because of potential accelerator/floor mat issues. Toyota seems to like to get out in front of these problems. A lesson Detroit could learn. It goes a long way to building customer goodwill and preserving company image. Look at how that goodwill has Toyota customers defending the company rather than vilifying them.
Verizon has been rolling out a new pricing scheme. I know from a letter I received that the original “Premier” plan is being removed in favor of the new “Extreme HD” and “Essentials” plans. The deal they are offering is to make phone service essentially free and charging full freight on the other plans. If you pay attention and look closely there are some deals in there. For those like me that intend to be on FIOS for some time there is no reason not to change over to a new plan. I ended up with the basically the same plan for $40 less a month. The requirement is that you have to stay with the plan for two years any the price stays the same for the balance of the contract. My contract was about to come up in January and then the price would go up another $10 a month. Just read the plans carefully and do the math. I ended up saving quite a bit by switching to the new plan before my contract was up.
I am not a Verizon fan as much as I know a decent deal when I see one. We have very good service in Maryland. This is a former Bell Atlantic area and we have always had decent if rather expensive service here. Comcast is no longer an option as far as I am concerned for that very reason since I ordered a DVR STB and received a broken one when I first signed up. The only good thing is they came and took their equipment away the day they said they would.
Surprised at getting more than I paid for? Not any more. These days I’m totally shocked if I get anywhere close to what I paid for.