
CES: Worse Products Through Software (2013) - Jtsummers
http://hypercritical.co/2013/01/07/ces-worse-products-through-software
======
fidotron
I'm not convinced many software people have the right to get too righteous
about this, and the fact is many of our systems that do work do so because
someone at MS, Apple or in the open source community wasted some of their
lives swearing at someone's drivers.

Frankly anything close to hardware, up to and through the driver layer, has a
real tendency to barely perform as required. It really seems like if it works
enough to show someone it looks like it's working they stop, but we've all
seen this attitude applied to higher levels of the software stack, except
there it's easier to deal with.

The single most telling gadget here is the Chromecast, which successfully
nullifies most of the point of smart TVs for <$40, while providing a user
experience none of the TV makers got close to.

~~~
logfromblammo
My anecdotal experience is that companies that have grown large based on the
sale of hardware are attempting to integrate new technical features into their
hardware to remain competitive, but they are completely unwilling to pay for
people with primarily software-writing experience.

The auto manufacturers, in particular, seem to expect that I should be paid
about 2/3 my current salary to physically relocate and then work 45-hour weeks
for them, if they even have any software jobs in the US at all.

To them, writing the software is like adding an extra cup holder.

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michaelt
You're always going to think "hardware companies can't do software" if your
definition of a hardware company is "a company that makes hardware with bad
software".

Last time I checked iphones and xboxes and tivos were hardware. If every
hardware maker with good software is a software company, and only the hardware
makers with bad software count as hardware companies, it's by definition true
that hardware companies can't make good software.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
The prime example of software made by a hardware company might be OS X. It's a
damn good piece of software. It's half the reason people buy the hardware,
actually.

~~~
dublinben
It's hard to call Apple a "hardware company" when they've been making software
as long as they've been building computers.

~~~
pedrocr
Id classify them as a hardware company because their revenue comes from
selling hardware. None of their software offerings are significant revenue
sources by themselves, they're just there to complement the hardware making it
attractive to buy. They've even made OSX upgrades free. They've been setting
themselves apart from the competition for a long time by the quality of their
software but that just makes them a better hardware company.

------
digitalronin
I haven't figured out why some chinese manufacturer doesn't make a TV with
software that is hackable and replaceable by design. I'm fairly confident that
a hacker community would soon make it into a seriously desirable product. Look
at XBMC, it's an amazing product. I would queue up to buy a TV set on which I
could run something like that.

~~~
Jtsummers
You know, something like the form factor of the new Raspberry Pi Compute
module might be a neat way to go about this. If they could agree on the
interface, it'd allow an otherwise "dumb" display to get easy, hackable
upgrades over time.

~~~
pedrocr
The standard VESA mount + HDMI would probably be a better fit than having to
cram everything into a SO-DIMM sized PCB. It should also work right now in
most existing TVs.

~~~
Jtsummers
True, but if they're going to insist on cramming things into the display
itself it'd be an interesting way to leave them somewhat future-proofed.
Personally, outside of mobile devices, I do like most others here seem to,
ignore the display's capabilities and attach a computer/Roku/Apple TV/etc.

------
bippi
"Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away."

\--Robert Metcalfe

Speaking as a software guy at a hardware company for TVs, one of the
challenges is that there isn't a cohesive conversation between the hardware
designers and software engineers.

On more than 3 occasions I could name off-the-top of my head, we've had to
write workarounds or re-architect entirely for missing or over-promised
performance of the silicon.

Likewise, some very useful features have been scrapped because they would add
$1.00 onto the cost of a unit. While I get that 1 million units x $1.00 adds-
up, the conversation about how this could either make a better product or that
subsequently spending 2 million in software maintenance, isn't cheaper---is
missing entirely.

This is a familiar refrain from other jobs and other engineers throughout the
custom hardware industry. This doesn't even scratch the surface of how
software engineers are essentially held to hardware engineering deadlines
regardless of the complexity of the software they're being asked to produce.

------
ds9
Personally I would not consider connecting a TV to the internet. Aside from
usability factors, it's hard to assess security (therefore the TV-ware has to
be assumed a hazard), there's little transparency into what it's doing, update
mechanisms are sketchy at best.

Most new models, it seems, have the so-called "smart" features, but it's
harmless if you don't connect it. I just use a TV as a big monitor - plug in a
PC and use a wireless keyboard from the comfy sofa.

More curious is why the TV and monitor categories haven't converged.
Eventually I predict, they will, when demand for OTA tuners fades and "cord
cutting" (as the cable TV industry calls it) goes to higher percentages.

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mcmatterson
Amen to this. I did quite a bit of digging last year to find a dumb TV that
did the basics (high panel quality, input switching, HDMI-CEC) well and
otherwise just stayed out of the way, and I gave up. A couple of companies
have a 'commercial' line that gets close to this, but they were priced totally
out of line with their consumer counterparts. Similarly, many TVs have a
'hotel mode' that comes close, but it's invariably undocumented and can easily
lead to bricking your TV. It's a wasteland of a marketplace right now, and
only getting worse.

~~~
pedrocr
This would be a good market for manufacturers like Amazon Basics or Monoprice.
Make no-frills screens/TVs with good panels and good input selection.
Monoprice has already moved into monitors[1].

[1]
[http://www.monoprice.com/Category?c_id=113&cp_id=11307&cs_id...](http://www.monoprice.com/Category?c_id=113&cp_id=11307&cs_id=1130703)

~~~
mcmatterson
Agreed. In many respects, what I really want is a 40"\+ monitor. An effective
power save mode could obviate the need for HDMI-CEC, and I'm sure I could
solve the outboard OTA tuner problem easily enough.

~~~
pedrocr
Right. These days a lot of people have a cable box or a fancy receiver feeding
their TV and then end up with a mess of remotes to manage this. Connecting a
monitor to the cable box or receiver and having a single remote would actually
be much cleaner. As you say, if the cable box shuts down the HDMI port when
off the monitor should turn itself on and off nicely.

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flavor8
My particular axe to grind here: car manufacturers seem to be unable to create
a usable random function on audio players. There's (almost literally) nothing
worse than hearing Bohemian Rhapsody 6 times on a road trip (out of 2500
songs, with 200 played). "Random" (applied to audio playlists) doesn't really
mean random (even assuming they're seeding their RNG properly) - it means
shuffle, which requires maintaining a list somewhere in memory, which is
probably why they don't bother doing it.

~~~
logfromblammo
Random selection of track and random ordering of the playlist is not the same
thing. People usually want the latter. They often get the former with a car
audio player.

It's even worse when the random track is not even produced from a good
pseudorandom number generator. In order to preserve the back/forward button
functionality, the "random" selection may be seeded as a function of the
current track number and the system clock date. So you end up with a choice
between the native playlist and the player's playlist of the day.

The only reason I can think of for making your hardware do such things is that
you don't care about the user experience as much as you care about the $0.15
cost per unit it would take to make the function work in even a 3/4-assed way.

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Jtsummers
Found via insaneirish's comment [1] on another article [2].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7620828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7620828)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7619117](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7619117)

------
interstitial
Software companies can't do software either. It's draconian masters that force
usability on programmers that would be happy if the world ran on CLI. You know
its the truth, or you haven't really worked with programmers before.

~~~
ginko
That's because the CLI is better than the average GUI.

~~~
logfromblammo
And also because if you start with a CLI, you don't end up with a GUI where
the functional code is embedded in the button event handlers.

The CLI makes it easier to force developers to separate the functionality from
the user interface. You still might have the guy that puts all the code inside
Main( string[] args ), obviously, but at least that code is easier to test.

Just like removing the presence of alcohol from the alcoholic may allow him to
resist temptation and become a better person, removing the GUI from people
with bad GUI coding habits may allow them to resist temptation and write
better code. But maybe not.

It also helps you discover who actually knows how to write software, and who
is dependent on the development environment to erect all the scaffolding for
them.

------
adolph
_At this point, the only thing keeping the hounds at bay is the reality that a
TV with non-crappy software requires a much deeper cooperation with content
providers._

I think there may be economic factors too. Isn't it true that TV replacement
rates are low and they have low margins? Given the longevity of displays, why
would anyone want to bundle in hardware/software with faster refresh rates?

