“Here’s”:1 an interesting post by Marc from the O’Reilly Radar blog on Tivo’s latest attempts to please advertisers at the expense of consumers. It seems that Tivo has lost another customer, Marc, because they continue to upgrade the advertiser’s experience at the expense of the consumer.

bq.. Tivo has already lost me for my next DVR purchase. What they’ve made clear is that they want money from people buying ads; and in the long run that means my reason for buying their product is no longer the product’s purpose. How long will it be before the 30-second skip hack goes away for good? Since Tivo can install updates to my machine’s software over the wire, without my approval or consent, what could I do about it if they decided, today or tomorrow or next year, to take away the feature that led me to buy their product in the first place? Why should I take the risk of finding out?

p. Marc goes on to argue that Tivo’s original business model was calibrated too far in the camp of the consumer, while providing no benefit to advertisers. Tivo should have better balanced its business model to provide benefits to both sides. Marc points out that successful intermediaries, Google being the paragon at this point, do balance their business models to benefit both sides of the intermediation.

That’s an important point to remember for businesses, but the best part of Marc’s post is one of the tags he uses to categorize his post. The tag? “Dumbass”:2

P.S. Speaking of dumbass moves by Tivo, remember this old print campaign?

!/img/tivo_ad.jpg!
Dumbass ad campaign

Ugh… they were the worst ads ever! Tivo’s biggest problem all along is that people don’t understand what it does. I’ve personally wasted a lot of time trying to explain the concept of Tivo to my Dad with no success, so I can attest that this is not an easy thing to do. So you’re telling me that those scary looking ads were supposed to do the trick?

[2(Businesses, don't end up a dumbass)]http://radar.oreilly.com/tag/dumbass

[1(O’Reilly Radar on Tivo)]http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/07/tivo_skips_cust.html

Why is Windows so stupid as to think that my computer is “disconnected” all the time?

!/img/microsoft_stupid.png!