Leibson's Law

May 14 2008 2:55PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (3) |
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Squeezed between the Googleplex and San Francisco Bay in Mountain View, there’s a block of single-story industrial-complex buildings. It’s very Silicon Valley. One of those buildings holds Oppo Digital, a company I’d never heard of before this week. That’s because I’m not a consumer of high-end video equipment. But my friend Larry Przywara is of that mindset and he has one of Oppo Digital’s DV-981HD upconverting 1080P DVD players. He’s also got a copy of Disney’s Pirates of the Carribbean: At World’s End DVD that he bought at a Walmart in Shenzen, China for the equivalent of US $2.25. (Just writing that last sentence is a complex exercise in cultural cognitive dissonance. Incidentally, Larry searched that Walmart for a product not made in China and found only a German-made Ryobi drill.)

As it so happens, Oppo Digital’s DV-981HD player has a problem with this particular Pirates DVD. It plays the movie fine, but you can’t turn off the Chinese subtitles. Larry’s previous DVD player, a rechipped Sony from 2001, does not exhibit this problem. After a couple of emails with Oppo Digital’s customer service, Larry decided to visit Oppo Digital. He lives in Mountain View. So today, Larry, Neil Robinson, and I drove up Highway 101 from Tensilica to Oppo Digital to discuss the issue. We took Larry's red, 1987 Rabbit convertible, which gets 30+ miles/gallon.

We first met with a customer service engineer in Oppo Digital’s lobby. He hooked up the Sony DVD player that Larry had conveniently brought along. The “old” Sony had no trouble switching the Chinese subtitles off. Then we switched to the demo DV-981HD player in the company lobby. It wasn’t able to switch the subtitles off. The next thing we knew, we were talking with Jason Liao, Oppo Digital’s CTO and VP of product development. Only in the valley.

Now the problem we were discussing was a pretty obscure one, considering that it’s a US movie stamped on a DVD purchased in China and played on a player here in Silicon Valley. Even so, we were getting what I’d call “old skool” attention from the company. Think about when the last time you got attention like this from a company with product problems that were much more severe. You’ll probably have to think back to the 1980s or even the 1960s to find comparable treatment. More likely, what comes to mind is a service call routed to “Larry” in a Bangalore call center who reads from a screen and can’t help you.

So I found the experience at Oppo Digital very encouraging. Larry will probably be able to update the Flash memory in his player on the next public code release for the product. Customer service isn’t completely dead yet. That’s actually nice to know.