*!@**@#&^$ comcast
Comcast owns every channel of communication that enter and leaves my house (except my mobile phone service and U.S. mail). They’ve got my internet, VOIP, and TV all to themselves. What a great opportunity to provide convergence and integration of all of this content and across all of these services!
Instead, they offer nothing of the sort. That makes me mad. Not only do they not provide anything impressive, they don’t even offer anything better than adequate. And some of their services are downright horrible. I stay with them because I don’t really have other viable options and I will admit that the convenience of a single billing package is nice.
Although I’m satisfied, but not thrilled, with my internet, VOIP and cable TV, the Comcast DVR experience is so terrible that it makes me think poorly about the entire company. The Motorola DVR that I rent from Comcast is an inexcusable piece of junk. I can forgive poor UI design (to a certain extent, anyway). I’ve been in this industry long enough to see that a good UI can be an advantageous differentiator, but also that a product with a poor UI can succeed if the core technology and performance is good enough to make up for the UI deficiencies.
The Comcast DVR has neither of these. The UI is awful in many ways (that would be a long article in itself). But even worse, the stupid thing is constantly failing in core functionality. A couple days ago, I noticed that the clock on the faceplate wasn’t showing the correct time. For some reason, the DVR’s clock had stopped or it wasn’t registering the correct time. The primary purpose of this device is to help me manage my TV schedule. Um, that is completely dependent on knowing the time. The outcome of this is that several of my schedule programs failed to be recorded. I had to reboot the DVR to get it right again. This is a complete failure of the device, not some UI difficulty. It completely failed to do exactly what it is meant to do.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t all that important. It’s only TV shows that I’m missing. But there is no excuse for this type of bug. There’s nothing difficult about this. It’s simply shodding quality control. It’s not like they need the latest and greatest processing chips or any other kind of technological advancement. It’s pretty basic stuff with really sloppy implementation, telling me that Comcast and Motorola just don’t care. I want you to care. Please care.