The Constant Defragger - Transcript

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knowing full well that when they come out with new technology old technology begins to get ignored. They tend to not really make it easy for the average user to use their technology. Now some very glaring exceptions have come up in the last five years. One of which is TiVo/Replay the personal video recorders the hard disk video recorders that hit the market and really took off. The reason they took off is because they did two things they took care of you know you taping your favorite shows without using any sort of video tape or without the horrors of that whole technology and they solved something else. They solved a two decade old problem and that was your videotape recorder blinking midnight, right? What they did was they said hey people don*t use their VCRs when they buy them now anyway because they don*t know how to program them. Now to be fair there was a technology prior to this called GoldStar and you know prior to Replays and TiVos where they tried to make changes. They used to print, remember they used to print bar codes for a while there in the TV guides and in the newspapers. And you could take this little device that looked like a remote control and they had all of the infrared codes from all of the major VCRs programmed into the remote control. And you would scan the bar code of the show that you wanted to tape and then you would aim your GoldStar it was called VCR plus. And it was from Gemstar not GoldStar, Gemstar and you would aim it at your VCR and hope for the best. Hope that the Gemstar people were smart as you hope they were so that it would actually program your VCR for you. Well somebody said hey wait a minute why don*t we just put the directory up on the screen and have the remote control, control what's on the screen. Now its common place to do it this way its common place for your local cable company to have a guide if you have digital cable that's one you know TiVo/Replay any of the derivatives of that. That is one of the glaring exceptions to what has been an amazing period of innovation but a disgustingly dismal period of user friendliness and you know God love America Online. America Online took the same kind of guff from the real Internet users for years that the first caller that had talked to me Scott I think his name was I have had people criticizing the kind of advice that I gave on the air you know very simplified I actually want people to get their stuff done same thing with AOL, same thing with TiVo same thing with Replay. They didn't want to sit there mired in glorified technology they wanted people to be able to get something done. Send E-mail, visit websites, buy things online, record their favorite television shows and on this show I try to do the same thing. I value your time, I want you to get your stuff done, I want you to go and be able to spend time with your family rather than trying to figure out why a new piece of software that you purchased doesn*t work on your machine. And the technology companies in America overseas they have spend too little time making things easy to use because they can*t recoup the money from that. It*s not a money making proposition for them and what their short sightedness really comes into play is when they realize that when they don*t make it easy for you to use these products you abandon them. And over time you lose faith in the companies and in the technology in general and you abandon that. Why would I get a new cell phone if I can*t figure out how to use the address book of my old cell phone? Why would I get a new cell phone if every new cell phone I get, I am less likely to be able to place and to maintain a clear sounding call. We are in the midst of a very bad section of technology. We have decided that the word digital quality doesn*t mean pristine. It means serviceable and widespread that's it. You watch digital cable, you have seen the pixelization occur when the digital cable flutters or fluctuates. You have seen that horrible picture that, remember the old days it would just sort of fuzz out and then it would come back if there was like some weather problems in

[Transcriptions provided by Datalyst]

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