I have been a relatively happy customer of Cox Cable, and have especially enjoyed their DVR service for the past few months. While the set-top box (which is basically a small special-purpose computer) is itself manufactured by Motorola, some other company writes and maintains the software that runs the DVR machine. Interestingly, this third company is constantly updating the software, and they seem to have an arrangement with Cox so that they can issue software updates to the DVRs at any time, without even telling Cox. Nowadays most modern operating systems and software packages have an auto-update mechanism that you can use to make sure you have the latest and greatest. The difference with the DVR software is that it is not under my control. If the software was always robust, I’d consider that a usability benefit; however, a recent update to the DVR software was not fully quality controlled, as evidenced by the conversation I had with Cox technical support:

Me: My DVR has stopped recording all the shows I’ve scheduled, except for Blues Clues, Spongebob, and Dora the Explorer.

Cox: Have you tried rebooting your DVR?

Me: Yes, that didn’t work.

Cox: You know, I’ve been hearing this same problem a lot over the past day from other customers. What you have to do is delete all your scheduled shows and re-input them. That should fix it.

Me: Okay, thanks, we’ll try that. (It only partially worked, by the way.) Why did this just start happening, any idea?

Cox: I think that the software company issued a new patch and didn’t tell us about it.

So the software auto-update model is not perfect. An inherent benefit of web services (such as Skweezer) is that they are always up to date, there is no client-update required. Nevertheless, before we make our latest improvements public to our customers and users, a thorough testing must be done. While there is always the temptation to shortcut the quality assurance step, examples such as this blunder by Cox’s software partner remind us that a botched upgrade increases support costs and harms customer goodwill, which is a poor exchange for agility.

This is my long way of saying that we’ve been working on something very cool, but you’re going to have to wait until it’s ready.

Update: it turns out that the software company I wrote about above is called Aptiv Digital, Inc. (formerly Pioneer Digital), and the software that they updated is called Passport Echo. Last night I called Cox support again (recordings still borked) and at the end of the conversation I asked if they could roll us back to a previous working version of the software. The agent said that was a possibility, since Cox/Aptiv has done that before in other areas in response to bad upgrades. Obviously this has happened before.