So, my Virgin Media set top box makes me scowl, and here is why because:-
We have Google and it lets us get at pretty much any information in the world, in baby seconds, and all it asks us to do is enter some words in a text box. It is so fast that I suspect if it took ten times as long people would still use it. It is so good that I often find myself entering a website name into Google in favour of hunting through my bookmarks or browser history. Typing "OU" and hitting enter, for example, is about as quick as I can get, or need, when I want to visit the OU website.
We have mobile telephones with a genius text entry mechanism to enable us to write text using just twelve or so keys. Not just clipped text - like teenage girls insist upon - but any passage of text we desire. Except, of course, paragraphs. We can't do them. Well, we can, but it's expensive. And boring. This grammatical martyr aside the language remains intact and full of vim.
Virgin Media, Sky et al... have ten tons of program listings. The remote controls, they give us to command them, have about six buttons per finger. And yet it takes me forty five minutes to establish Poirot is not on. Come on o' guardians of TV providings. Have you learnt nothing from these technologies? Let us search on program meta data. Just give us a chance...
P.S. Whatever happened to the 'previous channel' button on remote controls? The very first remote control we owned had this button, and about the next eight tellies did too. Not anymore though. It was mighty useful and now it's gone. Just like Gamesmaster.