Poor quality sofitware is everywhere
Your TV is just the bit you've noticed this week. IoT things are the bits other people notice. I spent some time grumbling (ranting?) at Google today because I wanted to look something up and all it did was return screen after screen of useless advertisements. Even my landline phone -- once the universal symbol of rock solid communications reliability -- has become a vehicle for unsolicited junk calls, the same types and sources repeating over and over, and with a voice quality that would have been laughed at in the 19th century. (..and I hope my Internet connection stays up so I can send this; its been a good few years since it was rock solid reliable.)
What's going on is the primacy of marketing over engineering. Our technolofy is becoming dysfunctional even as it becomes inherently more capable because the people that make decisions about how its presented to customers have different goals to those customers. They are only looking at sales, and often they're not even the owner/originator of the product they need to sell, they're just repackaging and marketing other peoples' stuff. Their Holy Grail is the subscription -- get people on the hook for monthly payments and never let them off.
Those of you in the UK have really been at the forefront of this. Back in the 'good old days' utilities were simple, relatively cheap and taken for granted. The providers had their shortcomings but nobody could say things didn't work (bear in mind that this was 'then' so the kit wasn't anything like as good or cheap). The problem was that these providers were sitting on, and monopolizing, income streans (they didn't think in those terms, they thought 'service' and stuff like that). So you got everything privatized and suddenly its all about choice, or rather how the same old/same old could be sliced and diced and presented as choice. Ultimately you ended up paying a lot more than you used to (because those marketing and PR salaries don't pay themselves.....).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
