Is Technology From Star Trek Or Gilligan's Island?

from the just-make-it-work dept

Thu, Jan 10th 2002 9:15am — Mike Masnick

An amusing article from MIT's Tech Review pointing out that people who used to expect technology to work well out of the box (the Star Trek model) are realizing quickly that technology usually doesn't work very well - more like the Gilligan's Island model. So, while people don't fear technology as much as they used to, they're becoming a lot more skeptical about believing if a piece of technology will really do what it's supposed to do. And, when it doesn't work right, they expect hellish customer service experiences.

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msykes, 10 Jan 2002 @ 2:19pm

Apple
People might accuse me of being pro-Apple...:-) But this is a lof of the whole point of Apple, and making the "whole widget". Stuff there tends to work pretty well out of the box.

msykes
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Anonymous Coward, 16 May 2009 @ 6:11am

Apple... Ha! Hahahahahaha... Yeah, until you've gone through 2 macs because the DVD drive in the first one was dead a month into ownership, and the next one had a dead pixel. These were brand new btw. And then an ipod harddrive dies. I never had this much trouble with IBM-based pc's. I had one pc run w/ no reformats for over 12 years. I'm not seeing this w/ Apple. But, in general, I think technology is just made more cheaply than it used to be a decade ago when only techie geeks used it. The techie geeks would never stand for back then what's come to be considered "normal defect rate" in current consumer electronics and technology.
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