Yet another Mac attack
MacDailyNews indulges in some hagiography:
Trying to make something like a Media Center within the confines of a bloated, malaise-ridden, creatively-challenged company, without the benefit of a single-minded, relentlessly-driven visionary like Steve Jobs, is obviously impossible.
Well, goodness. Glad they set us straight on that. I was puzzled by this kicker, though:
Microsoft is looking in the wrong places with their Media Center and, no, we’re not going to spell it all out here. We will say that Microsoft’s idea of taking the old TV+ VHS VCR paradigm and trying to make it digital is hardly revolutionary. Apple is taking a different path, as usual. And, we haven’t seen all of Apple’s pieces, yet. Microsoft’s Media Center, we’ve seen, and nobody’s buying.
Nobody’s buying? Last I checked, the installed base of Media Center PCs was up over 4 million, and it could be much higher now that Dell and a few other big OEMs have made MCE the default OS on consumer PCs.
I have no doubt that Apple could design a really cool Media Center alternative if they wanted to. But right now that bit of software appears to be locked in the brain of some visionary in Cupertino, ’cause it sure isn’t for sale.
Ed, the four million number, while great, is misleading. There is no extra cost at Dell to ship your PCwith either XP Media Center or XP Home. XP Media Center is in fact the default. It’s also the default at Gateway.
I think the better number to use as to the success of Media Center’s implementation is the number of Media Center PCs sold with tuners (a number that I don’t posess at present).
I love to bang the drum about the 4 million number as much as the next guy, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the four million users are buying the MSFT MCE TV story yet.
Thomas, the four million number was hit early this year, well before the current push to bundle PCs with MCE software. At the time that number was reached, there was indeed a cost to consumers (typically $39) to choose Media Center. And it was not a default at that time. So yes, they were buying.
Ed, I think Thomas is correct on this one. According to an e-mail I got from Microsoft’s PR firm before the release of Update Rollup 2, two million of those four million sales have come since May 2005.
It’s going to be really interesting when and if Media Center is incorporated into a standard Vista SKU–then every consumer PC sold will be a “Media Center PC.”
Personally, I don’t think it matters whether every user is using every Media Center feature. The OS is almost like a “stealth” play–users get a new PC with MC features, they get an Xbox 360, voila, suddenly they find themselves using their PC in new ways.
And Microsoft gets a few bucks extra per MC OS sold regardless.
Matty,
You are right that the four million number was announced in October and that Microsoft says 46% of all PCs sold in September were MCE boxes. But I didn’t think Dell started offering the free MCE upgrades until sometime in August. I was doing some comparative pricing in the last week of July and remember seeing $39 upgrades for Media Center at Dell. It wasn’t until sometime later that they started giving away the upgrades.
And that goes directly to my original point, which is getting a little lost here. The MacDailyNews story says “Nobody’s buying Media Center.” That certainly isn’t true. Even if the 4 million number is inflated somewhat, there is no question that at least 2 million PCs were sold as full-fledged Media Center PCs and that at least some nontrivial percentage of the remaining 2 million were sold as paid upgrades from OEMs.