David Hague23 April 2009, 5:09 PM
If you bought a new car, you wouldn’t expect to have to take it back the next day as all the fixes needed by factory recalls hadn’t been done would you?
I thought not.
So why do manufacturers of tech goods allow this to happen time and time again
Yesterday, I bought my very first Blu-ray title to play in my Sony new PS3. I raced home with it, fired up the 5.1 system, plonked the disc in the tray and ... nothing. Well if you count a message saying “this unit cannot play BD. You must upgrade the system” as nothing.
What? Thankfully being in tech as a journo, and having access to other hacks in the same game and more familiar with console units than I, I had the answer pretty quickly. I had to go to a website, download the latest version of the PS3 system, copy that to a USB thumbdrive in a folder called exactly “UPDATE” (note the capitals) that was inside another folder called “PS3”, reboot the PS3, connect the thumbdrive, go to the System Menu and select Update System from External Media.
Then wait. Well that’s alright then.
But please tell me why I have to do this. And if I didn’t have access to the Internet to both get the advice and download the 148MB file, what then? It’s like the 1980’s version of opening the biggest, shiniest toy on Christmas Day only to find Batteries Are Not Supplied.
What would Sony care if that download used up the remains of my ‘net quota and then I got shaped and had to effectively pay for the upgrade for something I had just bought. At least with a car recall, the company calls you and then fixes it at their cost. And don't give me any of that claptrap of a PS3 being only a fraction of the cost of a Holden Commodore. Cost is not the issue, responsibility is from the vendor viewpoint.
I remember this happening with the commercial version of Warcraft too. I paid my $49.95 to get the full disk and supporting documents and then spent the next two days downloading update after update. To the point that I simply gave up and cut my losses. Time – our time – means nothing to the vendors it seems.
One of the worst in this area is Adobe. As anyone who knows after removing an Adobe CSx and installing CSx+1, the time to do this is measured in calendars. And then you have to usually download a whole bunch of patches and fixes. Mine still doesn’t work. Nor does Dragon Dictate 10 that has the same problem.
While a percentage of these failures can be attributed to store level staff, and this can be fixed with training (the staff member at my video store didn’t know a “normal” DVD still worked in a Blu-ray player and I have lost count of the number of salespeople who have advised buying a DVD based camcorder because it is “higher resolution”), the biggest slab should be at the feet of the vendors/publishers. It seems the convenience of the Internet has made it easier for them to simply fix problems “later”. In our time.