To the question of "which 'dumbass' executive made the decision to add non-removable additions to the home screen": I believe the answer is "all of them".
This is an institutional problem within Roku.
Yes, adding new features to Roku is usually a good idea. I expect that there are people who do like the new shortcuts.
But Roku management and developers are fixated on the idea that they know better than anyone what the customers should get, and that whatever they do is, by definition, perfect. They do not appear to do any sort of customer testing, and I don''t think any of them ever read what the customers write here or elsewhere.
What appears on the home screen is important. The developers should have known that customers have always had the choice of what to put on the home screen, and that the new additions should have had this option from the beginning.
Unfortunately, they are not the only company or development group that feels this way. Too many company executives believe that they don't need to test any ideas with the customers.
I could give you a long list of very large and successful companies that were in business for many years, and were considered to be a permanent fixtures of the U.S. economy, which eventually died because they were out-of-touch with their customer base. Just off the top of my head, I can name:
Western Union
R.C.A.
Wang
Phillips (in europe)
Sears
Pan Am
TWA
Westinghouse
and if I took a few minutes for research II could probably find many more.
As bad decisions go, this one is far from being the worst I've seen, and they have promised to fix it, but it is important that we all continue to make our voices heard here in forums like this if we want to continue to use Roku in the future. Management and developers need to be told the truth when they make bad decisions, whether they want to hear it or not.
