Comment Articles

Hype cannot hide reality

Charles Cooper CNET News

Published: 06 Oct 2003 15:30 BST

This week's Media Center debut was the occasion for some marketing wizards to proclaim the start of the next era of computing.

The general pitch was that computers and consumer electronics are coming together around a specially designed version of Windows XP, and you now can do amazingly cool things with digital media that people yesterday could only dream about.

But before heading out to the malls this weekend, it's worth asking whether the industry is again over-reaching.

The idea that the personal computer is destined to find its rightful way into the living room by merging with a consumer electronics device -- be it a television console, a stereo system or some other appliance -- is not new. In fact, the pursuit of integrated, simple and convenient digital entertainment has been one of the technology industry's more enduring grails.

Bill Gates has been preaching about digital convergence since the 1980s. The scenarios have always fallen short of the promise, because the cross-breeding experiments proved tougher to carry out in practice. Unfortunately, companies still insisted on rushing out cobbled-together products that had interfaces that ranged from the barely adequate to the spectacularly lousy.

There's nothing revolutionary about using a computer to pause and rewind radio broadcasts, edit and print photos, or rip CDs onto a hard drive. Same goes for using a remote control to play a game on a computer. To be fair, the Media Center software marks the first time Microsoft has recast a version of its Windows operating system with digital media entertainment specifically in mind.

Microsoft also has had to rethink its assumptions about who would buy this stuff. A year ago, the company thought the idea would take root with the college set and twenty-somethings. Instead, Microsoft found the typical owner to be in his 40s. Lining up partners like Dell will help force down prices to within easier reach. But this is part of the natural evolution of things -- and hardly the revolution some of the more breathless claims would have you believe.