July 18th, 2008
As a follow-up to my earlier post, it turns out that Netflix has listened to the voluminous customer feedback and decided not to remove the beloved Profiles feature that lets you have separate queues. Here’s a picture from the email they sent us announcing the stay of execution:
I was happy to see them reverse this decision. However, I feel they definitely lost some customer goodwill, which it will take them a while to regain. For instance, I was strongly considering buying the new Roku device that connects to your TV and home network to let you access the “watch instantly” movies/shows from Netflix’s website on your TV instead of a computer. But since this episode, I am now far less enthusiastic. Also, I’ve started looking a little more closely at the Blockbuster online advertisements.
Netflix has worked hard to build their brand as a trusted enhancement of your movie watching experience, through features such as separate queues, ratings and recommendations, user reviews, social networking with friend lists/recommendations, etc. But the flip side of insinuating themselves more deeply into your life than being “just a movie rental service” means that customers feel a sense of betrayal when they propose to remove a beloved feature. Some commenters on various blogs and forums asked the reasonable question of “What’s the big deal? If you don’t like the service anymore, just cancel.” To which others replied “I’ve spent many hours rating movies and recommending them to my friends as encouraged to by Netflix. Now they’re going to just delete all that data, erasing in essence a small piece of my online identity.”
I guess the business lesson is that you can’t have it both ways; you don’t get to both have your customers be “emotionally invested” in your brand to keep them loyal in the face of price and feature competition, and expect them to react dispassionately when you make a seemingly reasonable decision to remove a feature that is expensive and complicated to maintain and only used by a small percentage of users. Note the way they sign off in the above email: “Your friends at Netflix”. Dear Netflix: if you want me to think of you like a friend, you need to act like one.
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June 19th, 2008
In case you haven’t heard, Netflix just announced yesterday that they are removing their “Profiles” feature, which lets you split up and manage the DVD’s in your plan with separate queues. This feature has been great for Amy and I - we have the 3 disc plan and use one shared queue for movies we both want to watch, and a separate one for each of us.
It seems like a PR storm is already brewing, judging from the following links I found with a quick search:
cnet
pcmag
slashdot
gmsv
yahoo
arstechnica
savenetflixprofiles.com
It will be interesting to see if Netflix persists with the decision in light of how unpopular it seems to be. Here’s the text of the comment I left on their blog post:
I want to add my voice to the chorus of disappointed Netflix customers. The marketplace for TV/movie entertainment is certainly getting crowded; here’s a partial list of the competition:
Blockbuster Online, Amazon Unbox, Peerflix, Hulu, Joost, Azureus Vuze, the TV networks own websites, Comcast On Demand, stealing via Bittorrent, etc.
With the ill will generated by this move, it gives all of Netflix’s customers a reason to go look at the alternatives. And not just those of us who use and love the feature - anyone else who is a current or prospective customer and hears about this boneheaded move will then be wondering when their favorite feature might be next, and whether their money might be better spent elsewhere.
Finally, here’s a picture that I think sums the whole thing up nicely:
(image courtesy of worldoffail.com)
Posted in idiotic, tech | 1 Comment »
May 6th, 2008
Went to see the Iron Man movie this past weekend. Highly recommended to anyone who would normally be predisposed to see comic book inspired or sci-fi movies.
One of my only complaints is that I watched too many of the trailers, which gave away too many of the good moments from the film. Maybe the studio felt they needed to do this to build buzz, since Iron Man is less well known than other Marvel characters?
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April 22nd, 2008
http://www.50waystohelp.com/
/me, working from home to save energy on commuting
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February 15th, 2008
This definitely sounds like what goes on at our house.
“Ongoing turmoil in the troubled kitchen-floor region of the Branson household reached a boiling point Tuesday, as relations between rival house cats Boswell and Johnson erupted into fresh violence.”
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/kitchen_floor_conflict_intensifies
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February 2nd, 2008
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January 4th, 2008
So, there’s a huge storm hitting the Bay Area today.
This morning our cat Leo was meowing as usual at the sliding glass door to our deck wanting to go outside. The wind was whistling away with sheets of rain falling, and I tried to explain to him that he wouldn’t like it, but as you may know cats can be stubborn. I slid the door open a few inches and a huge gust of wind and rain blasted in, causing Leo to leap backwards in the air about 3 feet and tear off into the bedroom to hide under our bed.
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September 27th, 2007
Here’s a cool article about a guy who works remotely for iAnywhere and has a telepresence robot in the office that he can drive around to interact with coworkers:
http://news.therecord.com/Business/article/236315
It would be funny if his coworkers put a sign on it which read “Welcome your new robot overlord!”.
Trivia: I used to work for iAnywhere for a while after they acquired AvantGo, which I had been working at. We were moved into the offices of iAnywhere’s parent company Sybase, and unfortunately (as far as I know) there were no robots roaming the halls there. That would have made it much cooler.
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August 22nd, 2007
Ever wanted to resize or crop a photo without losing essential details or having weird artifacts due to a changed aspect-ratio? Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg
I can imagine lots of applications for this, both good (remove your ex from that awesome group shot from a few years back) and evil (alter photographic evidence being presented at a trial). I guess an interesting but probably much harder next step would be to use similar algorithms to transform a video stream.
Posted in awesome, tech | No Comments »
August 17th, 2007
Doing what they do best, here are our cats Leo and Grace being lazy.
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July 27th, 2007
In an article about the recent and already infamous outage at the 365 Main Colocation facility, I noticed a bit about them using UPS devices with a flywheel instead of a battery. There is an interesting wikipedia article on flywheel energy storage, which is really encouraging from an environmental standpoint. One of the obvious problems with solar and wind energy is how to capture and store it for use when it at night or the wind isn’t blowing. Having a flywheel to store energy seems like a greener alternative, although as the wikipedia article mentions one of the main dangers of the flywheel is that the wheel can shatter sending out shrapnel at high velocity as it releases the stored energy all at once. While this may rule out some applications, for homes and businesses it might not be too hard to bury or shield it.
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July 20th, 2007
As previous readers may have noted, I have a penchant for bad movies. This past weekend I went to see the Transformers movie, expecting no more than what seemed to be promised: a mindless but fun summer popcorn movie that would appeal to the nostalgia I felt for the carton/tv show/toy series I loved as a kid. And it basically delivered on that promise, in a manner typical of director Michael Bay’s style which, as a friend of mine put it, is to make movies which are essentially a 2 hour preview for themselves.
One of the fun things about a movie like this is that it gives the critics good material to work with when pointing out its shortcomings. Here are two of my favorites:
How can a pickup truck contain enough mass to unfold into a towering machine? I say if Ringling Brothers can get 15 clowns into a Volkswagen, anything is possible. (Roger Ebert)
No screen cut lasts more than two seconds, and the good robots and bad robots all look exactly alike. I could never tell who was winning, who was losing, who had The Cube, or why it mattered so much in the first place. They could have spliced in battle footage from Godzilla and it would have made just as much sense. (Rex Reed)
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March 7th, 2007
Lately I’ve been listening to Phil Windley’s excellent Technometria podcast:
http://www.itconversations.com/series/technometria.html
He has had on some great guests and facilitates really interesting and informative discourse. Highly recommended.
Also, the entire ITConversations project is really great.
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January 5th, 2007
While on Christmas vacation, Amy and I were out shopping and I wandered into a technology store and spent a few minutes playing around with one of Microsoft’s new Zune media player devices. I was actually pretty impressed; the screen was large, bright and clear, and the user interface was decent. Lately I’ve been commuting on the train, and in addition to listening to podcasts on my iPod video, I’ve also been watching some video, and I think for that purpose I’d appreciate the larger screen of a Zune. Also the Zune seems to have built-in wireless - it’s not clear to me if you can do this, but it would be cool if you could use the wireless to sync it to your computer instead of having to use a USB cable.
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September 17th, 2006
For years it’s driven me crazy that you can’t simply drag and drop the tabs in the windows taskbar. I like to have my browser and email tabs first, then other programs. A common problem for me is doing something that requires a restart of one of these programs (say, installing a new firefox extension), and then having to go kill all my other programs so that I can start things up in the right order. It’s hard to believe this functionality wasn’t built in to windows from the start, but anyway I finally got fed up today and found this great utility called Taskbar Shuffle on the web which does just what I need:
http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshufflev10.htm
It seems to do some tricks that raise the hackles of my anti-spyware software; the program itself claims to contain no malware and I did a little searching on the net to make sure no one was reporting otherwise, and didn’t see anything troubling. I’ve also submitted it to my security suite’s vendor for checking just in case, but I went ahead and installed it (trust, but verify).
Posted in tech | 3 Comments »
