Microsoft Marriott

The Marriott Hotel in Manhattan Beach, California provides a host of services through the television in the rooms. These include “movies on demand” at $14 a pop and Sony Playstation 2 for $8 per hour. I can’t imagine anyone paying that much for Playstation unless: (1) someone else is paying their costs (business travellers); (2) their kids are driving them crazy; or (3) money is no object. It’s incredibly frustrating to be charged an amount totally unrelated to the marginal cost of providing a service, but maybe Marriott enjoys a price-insensitive clientele.

My favorite part was when I tried to use the wireless keyboard to access the menu of services. I got the following message:

A required DLL was not found: FILTERS.DLL was not found.

The wireless keyboard provided no way to cancel the error message. In fact, there was no way to make any selections on the menu in the background. All you could do was look at this clever Microsoft error message.

You would think that a simple “black box” type program like a menu of services served over a television would be pretty rock solid. But not when the television server is running Windows NT!

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