Lively debate! I like Hall's responses.
Here's the situation: you have a user interface (UI) vs. user experience (UX) debate. Now, while I own a variety of devices on multiple OS's, I am not a 'fan boy' of any one of them. I am a fan boy of doing things right
and a business having a "designed around you" approach. Dish
kinda gets there but lets their vision (opinion??) get in the way of an ideal UX a lot of times.
Agree that you have to take (educated) risks and try new things and as a Dish customer I'm glad they do. But remember, my UX is not always going to be the same as someone else. Hence why you should allow for a certain degree of customization (no, not
every single thing on the box!). The irony is that they already do, but to my point above, they let their own vision or ego or whatever trip them up into thinking some features are not important or a "though shall do it like this" attitude.
When they know that once you adjust to it, you won't mind it in the long run
Truth be told, they could take the same approach as that for the guide. Where there is no option to have the user change between ascending or descending order or view/hide the EPG. They pick one way based upon some sort of testing or user feedback they received and that's that. Majority rules, end of story. The UI does what it is supposed to do: moves the guide selections though all the channels. But the UX is bad as some like up and some like down. So they allow for the customization among a variety of other options we can turn on/off/whatever.
Look, the thing Dish misses is that they could have really cool features like this
and be a market dominator. Meaning, instead of just touting on their commercials that they have more channels or their price is lower or their DVR capacity is huge, they should also be thinking "how can I make things
easier for my paying customers and make it difficult to leave Dish?" To where you wouldn't think of leaving as the competition has no where near the things Dish service and equipment offers. Dish offers a service with competitors. We could choose one of a dozen TV watching options other than Dish in an instant. But if they think more about the UX and how customers interact with Dish equipment and not the UI (do it like we at Dish want) then it would be hard to leave.
Since this 'history' feature is not a component of the UI and can negatively affect a person's UX with their equipment, then it falls into a
configurable category. Like it? Keep it on. Hate/inconvenienced by it? Turn it off (but they still track usage in case the user changes their mind).