Microsoft’s grand strategy for TV

Back in the early 1990s, when I was editor of PC Computing, I visited Microsoft and got a tour of the room holding racks of servers for their top-secret “Tiger” project. I remember thinking, “This is never gonna work,” and spiking a story that the magazine had planned on the technology. Since then, I’ve looked at every single TV-related technology that Microsoft has introduced with the same combination of hope and skepticism. (Does anyone remember that Windows 98 had TV-tuning capabilities built into it?)

So this concentrated review of Microsoft’s TV strategy over the past decade by Brier Dudley in the Seattle Times was a trip down memory lane for me. If you’re thinking about the rapidly evolving relationship between TVs and PCs and what broadband connectivity will mean in the next couple years, it’s a must-read:

Over the years, the company has unveiled one grand scheme after another to provide TV services.

It first tried to merge the PC and the TV with a ballyhooed system called Tiger that it announced with Intel in 1994. Oracle and other competitors scoffed that Microsoft didn’t have the experience to deliver such a system. It couldn’t even get the prototypes to work when Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated them to a utility association in Seattle.

“You can see it’s not going to happen overnight,” Gates said at the time.

Then the company spent years developing sophisticated cable boxes. It also bought a California company called WebTV, which made devices for surfing the Web on a television, and continues to offer that service as MSN TV.

Partly to open doors with potential customers, the company invested more than $10 billion in phone and cable companies, including a $5 billion investment in AT&T, which later merged with Comcast. But that did little to move its early TV products.

Microsoft’s cable boxes were ahead of their time. After cable operators scaled down plans after the tech bubble burst, the boxes lost potential customers. So far they’re being used only by Comcast in the greater Seattle area and by three companies in Mexico.

[...]

Four years ago, after an earlier version of its platform failed miserably after its debut in Portugal, Microsoft decided to regroup. It assessed its collection of TV technology and where it thought the industry was heading, and decided to focus on two areas. It would continue to produce software for cable boxes and it would develop an entirely new platform for delivering TV services over the Internet.

The Times concludes that this is a classic Microsoft success story, that it “illustrates how they keep banging away until they get it right.”

Well, yes, but it also illustrates the essential optimism of the technologists driving this stuff. The infrastructure for this sort of system is just beginning to click into place in a way that makes IPTV and Media Center technology practical for a mass audience.

Go read the rest.