pippin wrote: > You forgot the "we-screwed-up-even-stuff-that-worked-before" aspect, > which is probably the worst one if you look at the user comments. Who > needs a working alarm? Bah, people don't listen to podcasts anymore! > Everybody must have an iPhone or Android these days! You don't need to > add custom radio stations! Has anybody ever used playlists?
Wow, I had no idea that it was quite that bad. Heh...so many things in those sentences that set my heart rate up. I spent literally months trying to get the alarm in a hardened state. If it's been screwed up again, sheesh they should just pull the feature. A faulty alarm is MUCH worse than the feature not being there at all. Podcasts...they get probably 50% of my listening time at home on my squeezeboxes now, and that's even with the general ignorance the device has for how to deliver a podcast UI. If squeezebox had both automatic and manual bookmarking and quick 30 second rewind/ffwd and a reasonable podcast discovery/browse UI (the only service for this, mediafly, did not cut it), you could grow the user base for that technology. On-demand audio streams of stuff-that-isn't-music is pretty untapped, and the demand could be there if someone would just cultivate it. Has anybody ever used playlists...well, making a playlist on the squeezebox UI itself is brutally difficult. That's more of an argument for fixing playlists than dumping them though (I know I'm preaching to the choir here and iPeng supports them well). I use playlists about once or twice a year, almost always when I'm having a party and don't want to be bothered with selecting music during the party. The web interface is passable for that activity, the squeezebox device UI not even close to acceptable. pippin wrote: > > 1. The Squeezebox, even the Radio, probably doesn't cater to a lot of > people who only want a simple internet radio. It's simply too expensive > for that, could get the same thing at half the price if you are not > after more (I believe that THIS will eventually be the main argument > that will kill the Smart Radio, horrible execution aside) Amongst existing European users, simple internet radio was the single most important feature, particularly the BBC. In the U.S., by contrast, it was by far Pandora. Local music use was harder to understand, but knowing that its use was shrinking was enough to doom it to its current crippled fate. Nevertheless, the data from Europe (by sales, quite a bit more important than the U.S. for squeezebox) showed that deferring sign-in/registration during setup was a very reasonable stance to take. My opinion is that how Logitech failed (past-tense, failed) on this whole thing is that there are/were too many people with decision-making power who believe that you only win by racing to the bottom. If they'd decided years ago that Sonos not only was a legitimate competitor (which they never conceded), but also occupied the market niche they had to attack with the power of their much-ballyhooed global supply chain and sales channels, the outcome may have been different. Sonos has now grown to at least 4x larger of a company, still laser focused on their product, which has sold > 1 million units and btw can now be purchased in the aisles of discount U.S. chain Target. But Logitech at its core wants to commoditize all products. I suppose it's one view of the world, but not one I want to be a part of... pippin wrote: > > 2. If you are a vendor with a decent long-term strategy (which Logitech > clearly isn't, right now), you HAVE TO try to get your users registered. > Simply because you need those numbers to get (online service) partners > interested and simply because you WANT your users to find it easy to > join these services later because that's what makes you an attractive > partner which in turn helps you to create an attractive product. > > Yes, I believe that would be the way to go. Have it in the normal > registration flow but allow people to just press "skip". And then (very > important!!!!) DON'T come back with the question later! Offer the option > in an easy-to-find setup menu (opening "My Services" would be a good > chance to explain that now you _have_ to register) but if the user has > opted for "skip" once, the initiative now should be on him/her. Fully agree you have to try to get your users registered, just not during setup, particularly non-optionally. I would not add the mysb.com setup menu item, but instead push to that window as an interstitial when accessing any registrationRequired = true menu item when registrationComplete = false. Either way works though. No sense overthinking a feature for a product with no heartbeat :) cheers, #!/ben ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bklaas's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=58 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96188 _______________________________________________ Radio mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/radio
