No Customer Focus

John Battelle writes the excellent searchblog. A recent post, Rant: The Comcast HD DVR Is Simply, Terribly Awful, provides another example of a company lacking customer focus. See the comments for even more confirmation of the lack of customer focus.

The interface is simply abominable. Unintuitive and careless, it copies the major features of Tivo’s approach but fails at every single detail – and in UI design, everything is in the details. No surprisingly, it utterly misses the core purpose of a DVR: to treat television as a conversation instead of a dictation. Without a doubt, this is an interface built either by Machiavelli’s cohorts, or by graceless bureaucrats, or both. No, wait, it’s worse.

Not to mention, the damn thing is slow – beyond unresponsive. There’s no way you can accurately predict where and when the thing might stop and start when you are fast forwarding or rewinding. The Tivo is like an Audi, but the Comcast drives like a 1972 Gran Torino Station wagon.

But that’s not where the crappiness ends. No, not by a long shot. Turns out, the ####### Comcast HD DVR *does not have a hard drive.* That’s right, when the power goes out, the ####### box loses ALL OF THE SAVED PROGRAMS!!!!

Related: posts on customer focus (including doing it right)Usability FailuresCustomer Focus at the RitzCEO Flight AttendantCompanies in Need of Customer FocusDell, Reddit and Customer Focus

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