The thing is, it's not these specific suggestions. It's the need to rethink the problem that's important.

One way to rethink the problem is to look at other industries and solutions for inspiration. What other industries might provide brain-food here? Is there another industry characterized by a centralized, high-cost, network-based infrastructure that needs to support outsider-provided nodes inter-operating with the network and yet needs to maintain both network security and reliability?

It just so happens there is: the cellular phone business. And in the cellular phone business, add-on devices are a booming market. Just one look at the over-hyped -- but still a genuine phenom -- iPhone will demonstrate the strength of aftermarket products in this market. In fact, there are cellular handsets of so many varieties, styles, feature sets, colors, and price points, the market is almost too big to keep track of, even by those of us whose job it is to do so.

It is an undeniably vibrant market. And the cellphone business is also going through major changes, from upgraded data speeds to Internet access to all the same technology drivers the cable TV industry is seeing.

Of course, the analogy is clear between the two industries. TiVo, Media Center PCs and other add-ons are to the cable companies as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other handsets are to the cellular service providers.

There is no doubt there is stress between the handset providers and the cellular service providers. There's mission conflict there as well. But although relationships between those two industries are somewhat strained, they have established close working relationships and those partnerships have created a booming market -- plus they're meeting the needs of their customers for variety and feature flexibility.

Perhaps the cable industry and the third-party set-top box providers could derive some inspiration from the cellular business. It might require some flexibility in thinking, policy, and technology -- but that's what any Flexible Enterprise will need to succeed, so it might be worth a shot.

Wrapping it up
Meanwhile, Denise and I are enjoying our new TiVo. We're hoping nothing else breaks, at least for a few months.

Special thanks goes to TiVo Community members DancnDude, JYoung, etz, alyssa, acvthree, GoHokies!, jlb, ZeoTiVo, petew, classicsat, yunlin12, JJ, and Budget_HT for all their help and insights in preparing this article. You can read all their comments in the TiVo Community thread used as part of my research for this article.

Further special thanks go to the folks at Weaknees for getting my new, highly "upgraded" TiVo to me overnight, with hours to spare before the cable installer showed up. If you want to turbo-charge your TiVo, these are the guys to go to. I've bought a bunch of upgrades from them and been unfailingly satisfied.

And while I'm on the subject of thanking people, kudos go to TiVo for having reasonable tech support people who have a clue. I was actually able to call in and talk to a real person, who was able to research a difficult problem. With the sad way tech support is going these days, we here at Computing Unplugged believe it's important to acknowledge companies when they provide quality service.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.