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Microsoft Ready To "Take On'' Google and Apple TV
Antisyzygy writes "Microsoft is getting ready to offer an internet television solution of its own, and will demo a TV box this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas." The rumor is under $200 putting it more on price point with GoogleTV at the moment.
Once again MS arrives late to the party with an offering that likely won't offer enough to be competitive. Good ol' MS: Reactive rather than proactive.
Not entirely accurate. Microsoft has went to this party before, and been "kicked out" before. This is just their most recent attempt. WebTV (launched 1996, bought by MS in 1997) being one such attempt. Followed by Windows Media Center. Followed by a "new and (un)improved" WebTV, followed by updated Windows Media Center, followed by even more Windows Media Center releases (in total, since and including launch, release/versions 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, Vista, Windows 7, and TV Pack 2008), xBox Media Center somewhere in that timeline, Portable Media Center for things like the Zune and so on.
Maybe this time they will succeed. The point above isn't slamming Microsoft. My point is you aren't quite correct in blaming Microsoft for being reactive instead of proactive. They were one of the first companies that saw the worth of this marketplace (even if they didnt figure out how to capitalize on it). Often it's hard to START a marketplace. Now, Microsoft has the advantage of seeing what's working for other companies in this marketplace. Thus my point is, it is NOT fair to claim they are reactive in this situation. They saw the potential gains of such a scenario when they purchased WebTV and later released WMC. They simply didnt know how to approach the market properly.
Now, it (if they want to succeed) will be a combination of their previous proactive attempts at Online TV plus a reactive look at ensuring their next offering addresses the needs, concerns and desires of those consumers who enjoy and use GoogleTV, AppleTV and NetFlix.
Further in Microsoft's defense, the technology has advanced light years since WebTV, making this marketplace a lot more attractive to the disaster that the initial WebTV boxes provided. And one step even further in that direction of defending them (at least for WebTV), besides the fact that the hardware was light years behind today's, WebTV and it's nightmare was an acquisition. MS did indeed try to rectify a lot of the issues with it, and in many cases definitely did so. But still ran into hardware limitations. Yes, there were still mistakes MS made in not judging what the majority of the marketplace wanted or needed, but my point is, it still would have been unlikely for them to succeed at THAT time (due to hardware and bandwidth limitations), even if they avoided their other mistakes.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
What they need is to get their heads out of their asses. NEWSFLASH ASSHOLES: the computer that I watch hulu on is connected to my HDTV over HDMI and there is nothing you can do about it. It reports Firefox because it is firefox, just modified so it has a reasonable 10 foot interface.