Yahoo! News – Media Center PCs So Far Not In Starring Role: Investor’s Business Daily points out the difficulties Microsoft is having and may continue to have in marketing the Media Center PC. According to IBD, “Media Center Edition PCs remain a high-priced, low-volume niche product two years after entering the market.”
There are two major problems that I see with Media Center Edition as it stands now.
1. The decision that was made NOT to aggressively pursue HDTV capabilty early in the process and still eludes the product today while satellite and cable providers are aggressively offering HDTV DVR products and even getting into the business of marketing HDTVs directly.
2. The fact that as it currently stands, Media Center Edition demos horribly in my home due to the extremely slow performance of “my music”. As a hopeful evangelist for the product every person that I show the system to in my home, and there have been many, are put off by the long wait times associated with playing music on the system.
Until these shortcomings are addressed, I agree with the article that Media Center will not see widespread adoption.
Microsoft should at minimum announce when they anticipate on correcting these two problems or at least leak the information to help build some real excitement over their product. Time is not on their side on this one.