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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ericneu who wrote (57347)	4/16/2001 4:42:07 PM
From: Dave	Respond to of 74651

1. In lieu of the patch, customers can turn the unit off and back on to reclaim the lost space. Almost. You can't "turn the unit off." When you hit the power button, the little red light goes out, and the video signal changes to an all black signal, but is still active. You actually have to crawl behind your TV and unplug the unit. 2. Microsoft detailed the steps that cause the issue (deleting a show while playback is paused) so that customers can avoid the issue altogether. They detailed the steps where? On the UltimateTV home page (I don't think so)? Or on some obscure Microsoft knowledge base site? Remember, this is not a product for the Internet savvy. In the consumer electronics space, you can't just have a list of known bugs to avoid posted somewhere so that people can find them if they happen to search for them. 3. If customers want the patch immediately, they can call tech support and get it. Again, are you suggesting that UltimateTV customers will magically know that their hard drive space is disappearing, and will somehow deduce that it's happening because of a software bug, and then will take the initiative to dig up their manual to find the tech support number to get instructions to fix the problem? Of course not. They will just continue to use the product, which will become less and less useful as its disk capacity wastes away toward zero. Then they will throw the damned thing away and replace it with a shiny new TiVO. Microsoft may eventually succeed in the consumer electronics space, but not until they can create products that are as reliable as telephones, TVs, and CD players. And that's not going to happen in the next few years, as long as they continue to base their products on Windows and its derivatives. Dave