At some point over the weekend, a new software update was downloaded to my Tivo bringing it to the latest revision, version 7.1a. It was interesting though how I found out about it – I was in the office reading something while Liz was watching TV, and I could hear a loud buzzing coming from the other room. When I walked into the living room to investigate, it was clear that it was coming from the TV – it sounded like the audio was coming from a tin can. Experimenting, I changed the Tivo sound over to mono – no sound at all, just a loud buzz.

Finally out of frustration, I pulled the plug on the Tivo, let it sit for a few minutes then plugged it back in and fortunately everything started working again.

If you’ve been reading Furrygoat for awhile, you already know of my gripes around software and hardware updates, but I cannot over emphasize how critical it is to get it right when it comes to convergence devices. Frankly, if you cannot guarantee the update will be seamless, I would rather you didn’t offer the service.

To me, this breaks one of the cardinal rules of the Exploding PC (can a device jump the shark?). A consumer electronics device, as far as most people are concerned, is no more computer than a toaster. Sure, we all know that Tivo runs Linux, but does my mom need to?

When software problems like this effect the average user, the device’s simplicity and ubiquity are destroyed in their mind.