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> I've worked as a software engineer writing embedded code, at several hardware companies, and nearly all of them see software as just another line item on the

• nebula8804 5y ago
  It is not a problem until someone comes along with a significantly better experience (eg. Apple). Until then, the mass market cares more about price.
• ryandrake 5y ago
  They don't seem to realize, nor care. I mean, my cable box's UI is horrendous. Icons that look like they were cut/pasted from a "Download Powerpoint Clipart" web page, complete with obvious aspect ratio bugs. 16x8 pixel bitmap fonts straight out of 1988, UI elements not centered, not padded/inset consistently, silly full-saturation colors (like someone literally picked 0xff0000, 0x00ff00, and 0x0000ff for their color palette), poorly translated error messages ("feature not invoke"), button presses take 1-3 seconds to take effect, channel changing takes 2 seconds. It's like a 15 year old's HelloWorldGUI project made it into production. At some point during development, some non-software person at the subcontractor looked at the software, checked some checkboxes and said "Yup, this horrible thing our devs cobbled together in a frantic rush meets the minimum criteria that were spelled out in the contract we signed with TvManufacturer. Ship it!"