Ed Bott's Media Central

Brian accurately identifies the point. A band-aid solution for now while a better solution is worked out for later. The HDTV TiVo is indeed, from a consumer’s standpoint the best at market at present. Although I suspect the Foundation box is similarly as nice.

The real money is not made by selling MCE operating systems in the short run or by spending a bunch of extra money now to develop something with little immediate P&L. The real money is made 10 years from now by monetizing the living room in ways that we can’t even imagine right now. This is a whole new frontier and Comcast and TiVo and DirecTV and Yahoo! and AOL and everyone wants a piece.

Look, many of Google’s free services today were once paid services: Google Earth, Picasa, Blogger, Hello. Do you think by making these free Google is concerned about short term P&L? No. They are trying to make the very best free thing from a consumer standpoint and recognize that owning these sticky properties will serve them well in the future when they find all kinds of new ways to monetize these services. Would I be lucky to keep my job at Microsoft for suggesting a short term economically unfeasible path? Perhaps. But so might the guy at Microsoft who suggests that they go back to all the paying Picasa customers and give them the service now for free. But perhaps that is why he is working at Google and not at Microsoft.

I disagree with you Ed that it would be impossible to put a closed system inside of MCE for the purposes of HDTV. Expensive? Yes. A lot of work? You bet. Two sets of architecture in the same box? Impractical? Perhaps. But not impossible. Not easy is not the same as impossible.

The simple fact is that Microsoft most likely does not feel that 1. the HDTV market is significant as I do at this time and 2. They would rather spend less money on a closed (inside of an open) system and more of that money and development effort towards an entirely open solution with DRM. While nice, they probably see the sweet spot a few years down the road. Their opinion is most likely that folks can wait and it’s not as huge a market as I’d make it out to be today anyway.

I can’t tell you how many people that I’ve talked to who are waiting on buying an MCE machine until a HDTV solution is presented. And it would be one thing if even generically they’d say you’ll get HDTV with Vista. That I could deal with. But my opinion is that by not saying we’ll have it in Vista that they still have doubts as to CableCARD in Vista and that things could still be a long way off — perhaps a long long way off.

I think significant resources should have been spent on a band aid closed system inside of MCE much earlier. I think that would have helped build more momentum for the product, create more excitement with earlier adopters and influencers and put Microsoft in a strong position to gain a stronger toehold in the living room to later exploit with an even better solution.

The point that started my recent (although there have been many in the past) rant with regards to HDTV in MCE had to do with Ballmer saying he was going to speed things up around the MSFT shop. I can feel Microsoft’s pain and I realize what pricks the cable providers and content owners can be and what a threat MCE is to them. But development has certainly not gone quickly. At least not to someone with limited vision of the process from outside the company. Perhaps at some point I’ll get a better insiders look at the company and feel differently. My hope is that some of Ballmer’s new quickness agenda might rub off on our getting HDTV in MCE.