April 2006

The Tivo’s have safely landed. That is to say, the Tivo adventure my husband and I embarked on over a week ago has come to a happy ending. After two different trips to our friends house so Tivo could make all the right phone calls and the span of over a week’s time, the Tivo’s are in their locations and working effectively. We got two of them and they actually talk to one another. It’s great now that they are all hooked up but the process of getting here was pretty grim. The friend’s house that we took the Tivo’s to told us stories of their co-workers that had not gotten as far as we had and just returned the Tivo’s thinking they were broken.

They were broken. We worked our way through that and now they are happily connected to the Internet (not a land line!).

So, to sum it up.

We bought two tivo’s to replace our cable DVR’s (which sucked and we paid rent to have them every month)
They have USB so should have no problem connecting to the home network-
OH WAIT, gotta make a land line call before anything else works, don’t have a land line? just go over to a friend’s house
oh, ok. so now you want me to impose on my friends because your product lacks some significant features—ok……
so we go to friend’s house not once, but twice–apparently it has to make 2 phones calls from the land line, the second of which is about 1 1/2 hours long.
after the second visit to said friend’s we leave the second Tivo there to complete it’s second call
product add-on, we need special equipment to get the Tivo’s onto the home network, first we buy generic and those don’t work, we are stuck with them as returning them would cost us a ‘re-shelving fee’ so it’s not worth it—-SO we had to purchase the Tivo branded products to get the Tivo’s on the home network

The Tivo’s made their calls. They are on the home networks. Tivo’s go.
But man, that was a lot of work. They should really fix this problem. Soon.

I know this is one of those things my friend Mahtab call’s ‘problems of the upper middle class‘. I really have no right to complain about anything. My life is good. But I feel I need to let my product experience with Tivo be known. This is the participation age after all.

New York Times quote of the day…

“Nobody has any sympathy for oil companies on Capitol Hill right now. You talk to someone driving to work in an F-150 pickup and paying $75 to fill up his tank, and everybody’s on his side.”

- JACK KINGSTON, a Republican congressman from Georgia.

I’m not on pick up guy’s side. I’m not on the oil company side either. I’m on the side of the future and the children. The guy driving the pick up and yes I mean you too if your car gets less the x miles to the gallon is making a choice. The choice to use lots of resources. The choice to use oil. The choice is to continue to make the oil executive rich and powerful.

Stop bitching about expensive gas. Make better choices!

I think expensive gas is a good thing. Do you have any idea how much it costs in Europe?

extra noise. in my blog. in my email. things i don’t want to read. things i don’t need to see. things that make me feel more burdened. things that drain the already carpal tunnel endangered wrists that soder my hands to my arms.

even though there’s spam, i still love the future. with every evolution you’ve got to expect some noise.

I work at Sun Microsystems. Today was an amazing event. Scott McNealy chose Jonathan Schwartz to be the Sun CEO.

I’m so lucky. Sun is a unique place. Scott is a unique and brave man. He created something beyond a company. He created jobs, something with a worldwide reach, something with integrity. I am proud to work here. I actually feel like my job makes a difference because I support a company that is choosing to behave this way. Not just a great company, but a good company. A company that does good in the world.

I thank Scott and feel so honored to have had a part in his vision. I’m excited about his choice. Jonathan is the right person at the right time. He’s going to lead us well.

It may seem strange for someone to be so emotional about their place of employment, but darnit, Sun rocks!

Let me just preface this post with a little history.

I’ve had Tivo in my life for a long time. My husband and I got our first Tivo in 1999. We loved it soooo much that I sold my car and carpooled with husband for 3 months so we could save up and give one to everyone in our family.

In recent years we’d been sucked into the DirectTV Tivo’s. Last fall we bought one that was HD. The only one. Being an early adopter has it’s perils. We found out that DirectTV was coming out with it’s own DVR and the Tivo model would not be supported. This made us upset. We had just bought it. Also, it never worked with our VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phone so the software kept degrading. So, since DirectTV had made us unhappy campers as customers, we got cable. If you read my previous post, you can see how that’s working out….

Anyway, on to today. So with cable we had DVRs from the cable company. After Tivo, these DVRs were not such a good experience. They had awful interfaces for finding programs to record and a killer feature, if the show wasn’t on for a couple of weeks, it just forgot about it! So we had to remember to remind our DVR to record programs we liked. Nothing like having electronic equipment with memory issues.

So we went down to basic cable and returned their DVRs. We needed to replace the barely passable cable company DVRs (happily). We were so excited, we were finally going to have Tivo again.

So we went to Best Buy and got Tivo. Everything was happy, happy until we got home and tried to connect it. You have to set it up with a phone connection. Not just any phone connection, but a land line. It has full capability to connect to the Internet, but you can’t set it up that way. You have to freakin call.

I just kept thinking. So, this is a company that makes products for early adopters. Don’t most early adopters have VOIP? Don’t at least some of them? And what about people that just have cell phones.

So we actually had to sit in our living room and brainstorm how we were going to get our Tivo set up. Because once it’s set up, we can use the internet for updates. So, we went through our list of friends to figure out who had a land line. Less than half of our friends do. We did find a good friend with a land line and we’ll go get it set up tomorrow, but WTF is up with that?

So for now, Tivo no go.

Just the basic cable. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve downgraded. Most people didn’t have the crazy amount of content coming into their home that we did. But this weekend we realized after months of suspicion, There is nothing on tv. There are so many channels. There is nothing on. It’s on the Internet.

We had recently (within the past year) switched from DirectTV to Time Warner cable. It was a definite downgrade to do that. We had our reasons at the time. I don’t remember what those reasons were anymore……

Then there was cable. And cable is even worse. So bad in fact that we have freed ourselves from it. Again, all the content is on the Internet. We did the math. If we bought everything non-network (which is what basic cable gets us…) we’d have to watch over 50 pieces of content in a month at $2 a shot. (that’s the going rate on iTunes) It’s not likely that we’ll do that, so, bye bye cable, hello iTunes.

If you’ve got good content, people will pay to see it without commercials. Huh.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I love the future.

My friend Shannon sent out this picture. It’s a really good question!

I’ve always struggled with the fact that the work I do seems a bit ‘touchy-feely’ to business folks. But today I learned about some secret sauce that makes it quantifiable. There are actually methods and models to prove that a good Customer Experience has a significant effect on the bottom line. It can be about profit and doing things that delight customers. That has always just been a gut instinct but now I’ve got numbers and proof to back me up.

way cool.