My love-hate relationship with technology

I have noticed a life cycle with my enthusiasm for any new piece of technology:

At first I love it
Then I love it some more, and start hooking up other people with it
Then I begin to notice the bugs, which I try to ignore because the technology is so cool
Then the bugs begin to bug me
Then I start getting pissed off that the innovators are not working faster than my wish list is growing
Finally, I await eagerly for competitors who have learnt from initial company’s mistakes, and are going to offer me a better product.

Although this happens to me often with online technology, what really got me thinking along these lines was the PVR decoder (South Africa’s answer to Tivo).

At first I thought it was great. How could I have lived without it? I tried to sell everyone I knew on the concept (quite successfully, actually) and then I enjoyed it some more.

But as I got used to taping shows to watch at a later time, I began to expect the decoder to do half the work for me. If I watch The Apprentice three weeks in a row, I would have appreciated if it worked out that I want to watch it in the fourth week as well. And actually, the decoder did pseudo-get this feature eventually by asking me if I wanted to tape all the episodes of a show. The problem is that it tapes every instance of the show, irrespective of the season or the channel. So now, instead of getting a weekly dose of Two and a Half Men from M-Net once a week, I get three old episodes from the Go channel as well. Not a train smash, but annoying nevertheless.

I also want to organise my watch list into folders. I want kids’ programmes in one folder, documentaries in another, and shows I have already watched but am saving for other people in another folder. I don’t mind setting up the folders myself, but for God’s sake — let me do it! I have a list nine screen shots long of taped programmes and it is annoying wading through them all.

DSTV on demand is great: you get to watch good shows, as chosen by DSTV, instantly at the press of the remote without having to tape them. This is how I stumbled on Californication, which by the way, I think is superb in a here’s-the-finger-to-conservative-Americans kind of way (the title says it all). But, as soon as I loved the on-demand feature, so I was dismayed that you couldn’t actually tape the shows to watch at a later time. Please don’t dangle carrots and refuse to serve them the way I want them. Not cool practice.

The delete feature is also great. The lack of undo button is not so great. I have deleted shows I meant to watch (due to the strangest method of chronology listing that I have yet to work out). I have seen these deleted items sit in my delete box. But there is no way to move them from the delete folder to the “inbox” folder. Nope, they just sit and glare at you with the what-might-have-been look of gloom.

I need to stress, I love my PVR. But if the PVR was an online technology innovating at this speed, it would be toast because a competitor would have picked up on the features it lacked, and would have made them available. But since it is a monopoly anyway, innovation does not seem to be a priority. I cannot help but feel, every time I stare at the PVR menu, that I am looking at old technology, the one we talk about when we say things like “Remember when your cellphone was the size of a brick and weighed twice as much?”.

Two things to take from this, I guess:

1. If you work for DSTV, start understanding that changing the order of the channels to suit their “genres” is not how innovation, advancement and creativity should be defined at your company.
2. The internet has spoiled us for innovation, and speed thereof. It’s a catch-22. That’s why things move at a lightning speed in this space, and why being the first to market is actually rarely a winning move.