Microsoft taking aim at home entertainment ...
James Coates
Published July 28, 2002
Bill Gates has his eye on your television set. He thinks your TV should stop being just a video machine and become a computer. Care to guess which operating system Bill wants your television set to use?
Look at it this way. There are a bit more than 100 million households in the United States. About 48 million of these homes have a computer. By contrast, virtually the entire 100 million households have one color television set and more than half of them have at least two TVs.
With computer sales to American homes now flatter than they ever have been, Gates set his sights on the far larger video market.
In the past couple of weeks Microsoft Corp. put many of the finishing touches on a coming fall campaign to join forces with consumer electronics outfits and PC-makers to flood the stores with the first generation of hybrid devices that Microsoft code named its "Freestyle" project.
The Freestyle collaborators include a global triumvirate of the giant makers of both computers and home entertainment products: Hewlett-Packard Co., Japan's NEC Corp. and Korea's Samsung Electronics Co.
They're about to unleash a flood of television sets, DVD players and home music systems that have full-blown Pentium computers running the next generation of Windows XP built into their innards.
Called the Windows XP Media Center Edition, the new look for the operating system now on 90 percent of the world's desktop computers will be based on a user employing an infrared remote clicker box instead of a keyboard. One will use the clicker to move a cursor arrow across a device's screen and click open the Start menu.
Start will open the way to a rather stunning upgrade to Microsoft's already robust Media Player software called Media Player 9.0, a program that handles everything from playing conventional music CDs to running high fidelity multichannel DVD movies and displaying streaming video feeds of the latest Hollywood movies over broadband connections.
Sources at the Microsoft Network tell me that Microsoft plans to offer this high-speed content through telecom giant Verizon.
The idea is to sell homes not only Microsoft-powered NEC and Samsung TV receivers and music players running Windows XP, but to sign them up for subscriptions to MSN (about $25 per month) to download and play--in real time--movies, music, games and other goodies.
Look for an unveiling in early September when Gates plans an extravaganza release of Media Player 9.
It's all part of a master plan that Gates hatched shortly after stepping down as Microsoft's chief executive officer and taking instead the title of chief software architect.
As word of the Freestyle project emerged from Microsoft's corporate campus in Redmond, Wash., it became dramatically obvious why Gates ordered his company to charge American consumers $200 for the Microsoft X-Box game machine that some analysts suspect cost the company $250 to make.
Just as many hackers, like MIT's Andrew Shane "Bunnie" Huang, who have dismantled the carefully encrypted X-Boxes suspected, these seeming toys are full blown Intel-architecture personal computers as well as games. With the new Windows XP Media Center operating system, they already have a major foot in the door as the company focuses its huge resources on home entertainment .
It's a move clearly being made with all of the cunning and ruthless singularity of purpose that has been Gates' style from the beginning.
If it weren't so important to the future of the American economy it would almost be amusing watching Gates and his masters of manipulation at Microsoft scramble to find something beyond desktop computers.
And what a scramble it is as Gates struggles with the unhappy fact that he no longer is at the helm of a revolution.
Even without today's gear-grinding economic slowdown, the home computer business would have lost much of the momentum that propelled it through the roaring '90s.
Those homes that were likely to buy a computer now have done so, and the great boom as folks rushed to get online is over. Home PC sales have become a replacement industry rather than a revolution.
Computers are a mature industry. Just like toasters and sewing machines and automobiles. Watching computer hardware and software sales has become almost as dull as watching paint dry.
Nobody knows this better than Gates. Just about anybody who ever worked for him or interviewed him will tell you that nothing makes the world's richest man bristle as does telling him that his company exists merely to sell upgrades to past glories.
"We are not an upgrade company and we never will be an upgrade company," Gates shouted at this writer back in 1996.
But as far as computers go, that's exactly what Microsoft has become. It is the world's largest PC software upgrade company by a mile and a yard. And there's nothing wrong with being in the upgrade game, either.
Before Microsoft takes over the look and feel of our television sets, I wish someone would just tell Gates to chill out and remember that Ford Motor Co. does quite nicely selling upgrades. So does General Motors.
Chicago Tribune
