A suitable caution

The concept of simplification is a lot easier than the accomplishment as documented in Streamlining the Universal Remote Device by Eric A. Taub.

In the classic Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien the action hinges on the One Ring:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

It has been thirty-one years since the introduction of the first universal remote control and despite the absence of orcs, giants, dragons and trolls, we still don't have a widely acknowledged useful universal remote control. From Taub.

If you’re of a certain age, you may recall what you had to do to watch television: You turned the set on.

Today, things are much more complicated. With HDTV, separate audio receivers, Blu-ray players, game consoles, streaming media players, and cable or satellite set-top boxes, simply turning on the TV feels like operating a console at NASA’s mission control.

The idea of a “universal remote,” one device that can control everything in your home theater setup, is not new. But too often, products that have claimed to be universal have failed to deliver.

To get them to work, users often have had to manually enter codes for each device. And even when that’s successful, many important commands are buried in a remote screen’s submenus, making them cumbersome to operate.

“That’s not an inaccurate assessment,” said Ian Crowe, director of marketing for Logitech’s Harmony, makers of the most popular universal remotes. “We’ve heard problems endlessly about how it’s been impossible to program them. A universal remote only made your coffee table look nicer.”

It is a suitable caution that simple ideas are not the same as easily achieved ideas.