21st century B&O – Beta & Olufsen?

I played with Moment at my dealer's, with the latest software, and it felt finally ready for primetime. It's a big step in the right direction. At the same time, I feel saddened by today's news of the BV software update being delayed.

I applaud B&O for letting their enthusiast customers engage in Beta testing and development of their software: Moment, the new BeoVisions, the B&O App. For enthusiasts, it brings a nice transparency to the process, and BeoWorld is no doubt the world's best forum for it.

I'm terrified for B&O for their customers, who are not members of BeoWorld, and buy a high-end product with the (reasonable) expectation that it just works and provides a pleasurable experience. I wonder how many non-enthusiasts give up on the brand?

Today, much of the "magic" of user experience happens in software, not mechanincs, and I hope B&O finds this 21st century magic. Jerky electronic curtains, buggy features and unintuitive user interfaces are far from it.

B&O should invest heavily in a "software factory" and get it on par with their aluminium manufacturing excellence. One is the interior, the other is the exterior, of a modern Bang & Olufsen product. They should invest with equal uncompromised effort in the design of both.

They have the Viewing Panel and the Listening Panel (they still do, right?) as a part of product development. They should also have a Control Panel (pun intented) for software, interface and feature development. They could hire it from this very forum – a partly virtual team of enthusiasts – and put the 21st century bang in the Bang & Olufsen experience!

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Think that the transformation from the being a "mechanicals" developer to software developer has been far harder than what B&O expected. While you can find really skilled developers who can write beautiful code they necessary doesn't have the skills for thinking from user perspective and front-end GUI. Just seeing what some universities provides students with when it comes to education material; it's the text book on how one should NOT code when it comes to secure coding, etc. A good example of really nice combination is actually BeoSound 5 where you have the mechanical wheel together with nice GUI. If that unit could be proper upgraded with up to date software and getting ride of the bulky box (which they did do with BS5 Encore but it then lacked MasterLink integration) - I would buy directly and I was really interested in it and so was my wife which I had to stopp from buying the unit. So I think that a lot of their old products still could have a place in the market but they just needed to be updated to todays standard.

kimhav:

Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Think that the transformation from the being a "mechanicals" developer to software developer has been far harder than what B&O expected. While you can find really skilled developers who can write beautiful code they necessary doesn't have the skills for thinking from user perspective and front-end GUI. Just seeing what some universities provides students with when it comes to education material; it's the text book on how one should NOT code when it comes to secure coding, etc. A good example of really nice combination is actually BeoSound 5 where you have the mechanical wheel together with nice GUI. If that unit could be proper upgraded with up to date software and getting ride of the bulky box (which they did do with BS5 Encore but it then lacked MasterLink integration) - I would buy directly and I was really interested in it and so was my wife which I had to stopp from buying the unit. So I think that a lot of their old products still could have a place in the market but they just needed to be updated to todays standard.

Except the encore was a complete pile of rubbish (for me it was)

It was a beautiful design and oh so beautiful. Smooth and tactile and available in white

The laser pointer was smooth but you had to be precise with it

I reckon the moment could have morphed in to this design and it would have been amazing.

You can plug in so much more to an encore / BS5

Again though the bs5 was windows xp and I beiekve the encore was Linux

KMA:

m terrified for B&O for their customers, who are not members of BeoWorld, and buy a high-end product with the (reasonable) expectation that it just works and provides a pleasurable experience. I wonder how many non-enthusiasts give up on the brand?

Today, much of the "magic" of user experience happens in software, not mechanincs, and I hope B&O finds this 21st century magic. Jerky electronic curtains, buggy features and unintuitive user interfaces are far from it.

B&O should invest heavily in a "software factory" and get it on par with their aluminium manufacturing excellence. One is the interior, the other is the exterior, of a modern Bang & Olufsen product. They should invest with equal uncompromised effort in the design of both.

I agree completely with your statement, KMA.

I don't think anybody 15 years ago we have associated B&O with the word buggy, but that is very much the case today. Poor software engineering is poor engineering. Poorly engineered product does not befit the B&O label.

Customers today are expected to wait for extended period of time after the purchase for hallowed software updates that will one day in their fifth or sixth iteration have fixed all problems, gradually introducing a user experience similar to but not quite like what B&O was once known for.

I have the highest regard for the people working with software and user interfaces, but management clearly needs to give this area more focus.