Products That Change Without Permission

Imagine entering your car one morning and discovered that the pedal on the right had mysteriously become the brake and the one on the left had become the accelerator. You might not just be angry You might even end up in the hospital. Imagine your apps doing the same thing.

PC World writes: “It wasn’t quite that hairy, but for the first time in my experience, a stand-alone consumer product recently used my Internet connection to change its own essential behavior without warning. One day the device worked one way–a way I’d come to know and understand, even when it didn’t work entirely right. The next day, caramba! It had a whole new user interface that was significantly worse than the one I had grown accustomed to. The device? The DVR I lease from Comcast. I’m just glad the company doesn’t make cars.”

On computers, such behavior isn’t unprecedented. AOL, for instance, has long presented users with new features and updates without asking. But I don’t recall its ever automatically handing users an entirely new interface; and even Windows Automatic Update, which sometimes pushes fixes that can cause trouble, asks whether you really want Internet Explorer 7 before sticking you with its new look and feel.

I can’t remember another product that woke up one morning with a hangover quite like the one this DVR had. Here in Seattle, Comcast’s Motorola DVRs had run on software by Microsoft, with the usual Microsoft collection of bugs such as recorded shows that seemed to have lost their audio until you restarted the machine. But at least the user interface was relatively polished.

Read the full article on PC World