Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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Walt Mossberg has a great write up on the Suckiness of the Comcast DVR. It echoes my experiences with that horrible piece of junk.
I like this quote:
"The answer is that, at least in my recent experience with the nation's biggest cable company, Comcast, the high-definition DVR it supplies is just awful. If cable boxes were sold at retail like consumer-electronics devices, the Comcast DVR I tested, built by Motorola, would get creamed by better competitors."
and this one:
"Also, the user interface on the Comcast box is crude and confusing -- nothing like the elegant interfaces people have become used to on their personal computers and devices like iPods. The TiVo interface, by contrast, is effective and attractive."
"In the program grid, even on a 50-inch, high-definition screen with acres of room, the Comcast box displays just four rows of stations at a time. Until recently, there was a fifth row, but now that has been replaced by an ad. The ad not only sucks up space, but also is aggravating because it gets selected each time you reach the bottom of the grid screen. Advertising is fine, but in this case, sacrificing 20% of an already paltry information screen for an ad just shows contempt for users."
"In the program grid, even on a 50-inch, high-definition screen with acres of room, the Comcast box displays just four rows of stations at a time. Until recently, there was a fifth row, but now that has been replaced by an ad. The ad not only sucks up space, but also is aggravating because it gets selected each time you reach the bottom of the grid screen.
Advertising is fine, but in this case, sacrificing 20% of an already paltry information screen for an ad just shows contempt for users."
This is by far the most scathing comments I've seen Walt make about any product. "crude and confusing", "contempt for users" are not things you want Walt saying about your product or company.
I wonder if the BigCo media execs at Comcast are at all embarrassed? Probably not.