Why Can't My TV Fix Itself ?

We all know about the Geek Squad, the highly successful subsidiary of Best Buy started in 1994 to help you solve your pesky tech installation and service problems.

The idea is great and sorely needed by all of us who cannot figure out how to get viruses off our computers or how to set up that new HD flat screen and get the damn sound to come through.

But the service doesn’t come cheap considering how long it normally takes them. If you’ve ever had one of their “secret agents” out to your house, you probably experienced something like the following:

• You make the appointment
• They come out in a day or two
• They arrive and you explain the problem.
• They poke around behind your TV, move a cable, pick up the remote, change a setting, and they’re done.
• You pay them $100 for their travel time and the 12 minutes they were actually working on your problem.
• They leave
• You feel stupid

So what’s the alternative?

For today, the alternative is to figure out how to do it yourself by reading the manual or going online and spending time searching through forums for the same problem, or, and this is the best alternative from your perspective, call upon your built-in tech support agent. That would be your spouse or son-in-law or teenage daughter.

But what about tomorrow? Will it get to the point where you have to set up a yearly contract with the Geek Squad? Will we all develop a deep dislike of anyone with an Indian accent? Will geeks finally gain superiority over the technologically-impaired on Harmony.com? I don’t think so.

Call me an optimist, but I really believe that over time in spite of the rapidly increasing complexity of technology, the problems we face will get better. The premise for this non-intuitive idea is that as memory continues to get cheaper and embedded computing power continues to grow rapidly in everything from your toaster oven to your satellite receiver, these things will start to fix themselves. Hey, it could happen!

By fix themselves, I mean that they will either 1) walk you through a troubleshooting and repair process on their control panel, or 2) go online themselves and, with the help of the mother ship, fix themselves without you ever knowing.

It sounds like science fiction right now but believe it, the market will force the issue. Billions of dollars are being spent by high tech companies to handle all the service calls that their poorly integrated products create. The best example for me at the moment is home theater. With the advent of HD and flat screens, the whole cabling and signal management problem has gotten much more complicated. Some receivers pass through the audio, some do not. As the commercial says, you need an engineering degree to figure it out.

Computers also have a long way to go before they can protect themselves from getting messed up thanks to Microsoft. Automobiles will also diagnose themselves and hopefully, once they become all electric when the internal combustion engine is finally retired, become easier to diagnose and repair.

Of course, before long your home computer named “Hal” will develop an intimate relationship with your home theater and your car and your pool equipment and your toaster oven.

That’s kind of a scary thought actually.

“Hello John, you were up late last night. I noticed you ended a sentence with a preposition while you were writing your last article. Do you need a vacation?”