@momoabc wrote: if they continue with their forced updates, poor customer service and poor product decisions companies can go bankrupt quickly.
I agree. After 2-3 weeks on this forum, I remarked (many times) how I would not believe what I'm seeing if someone had told me about it. I'd think they have an ax to grind, embellishing, etc. Even more remarkable is that, every day it's something even more unbelievable.
During the height of objections to how 9.4 broke antenna tv (and the ensuing "thank you for reaching out, I've passed it along" disregard), Roku changed my background to a caricature of a broken antenna tv. It's like they don't care (and are proud of not caring).
A common "trick" to fix problems is called "clearing the cache." Last summer, Business Insider did an article about the problems Roku customers were having (it had reached that level of visibility). Roku's only contribution to this article was to say "there is no cache." As if that's what everyone needed to know. The tone was "(eye roll) silly customers." No comment on what it does, or why so many customers are having problems, or what Roku's doing to address this mess. Just, smug, arrogant "there is no cache (so there)"
Here we are, eight months later. Nothing fixed. Things worse. Customers whose tvs were clearly broken by Roku's untested update, told to take it up with the tv maker.
There is absolutely no sign of any concern about any of this. Recent news has Roku getting into original content production & buying Nielsen's ad software. Not fixing what it has, just moving on to new, sexy things. CEO Wood sold over $160 million in stock last month alone.
A few days ago there was a system-wide guide outage. Roku couldn't post anything here on the forum about it ("we're aware of a problem. We ask for your patience as we..."). They couldn't post anything to their Facebook about it. They couldn't even inform their helpdesk about it ("hey, we've got a known problem. Expect some calls."). The helpdesk was putting callers through the "now unplug your tv" routine like it was something wrong with the customer's tv.
They still haven't said there was a problem. It was an "issue." Roku's said nothing about the failure of their support infrastructure to inform customers that Roku was aware (or even Roku's own support infrastructure)
The constant message is that the customer comes dead last.
As you said, it's inconceivable that a company can survive this way.
I think Roku has capitulated the tv space. Their external streaming boxes appear to be ok. It was all hardware they were in control of. But, the marriage to tv looks like someone didn't think about how that would work (with a dozen brands, and a dozen models per brand, and a dozen hardware revisions per model). It's a nightmare which Roku seems ignore (or given up upon).
A few years ago, CEO Wood boasted about how Roku would be "Android on TV." That must have sounded good then -- before Android was on TVs. Now it is, and Roku seems to be in denial (or doesn't care; given up). You can opt out of updates with Android. Android doesn't have this kind of squishy, ill-defined, "we don't know who was responsible to test the update." It has clear lines of responsibility.
Everyone at Roku has been giddy about the stock price & windfall from an apocalyptic pandemic (bringing a surge of new subscribers). They don't seem to realize that's a potential curse. Moving future customers into the current period, who will see the dark underbelly of this company. Instead of being an epoch of success, my money is on it being a windfall of negative word of mouth.
Time will tell. What's clear is that Roku isn't worried about that. They haven't hit a wall yet. Nothing has seemed like "going too far" to them yet. They seems quite comfortable & proud of their performance.
"People are often amazed at how much we’ve done with the number of engineers we’ve got." (Roku CEO Anthony Wood, Austin Statesman, Oct 4, 2019). "Amazed" is one way of putting it.
