In praise of Windows Media Center

Microsoft showed off developments on Windows Media Center last week at CES. Despite the Ballmer bluster, despite the inexorable march of Microsoft to seize control of all your screens, something important needs to be said.

Specifically: Not bad, Microsoft.

We've come a long way from the schadenfreud-a-riffic 2005 CES keynote, when WMC crashed during Bill Gates's keynote demo. (We've even come a long way from November, when Microsoft hauled a group of writers and bloggers out to Redmond to talk about WMC for Windows 7 but showed us mainly screen shots.) Our brief visit with Windows Media Center was an encouraging look at a product that's gotten smarter, more flexible, and more fun to know with age.

Some of the charm may simply mean that Media Center's edging out from under Vista's long black shadow. Some of it may also be mounting excitement over Media Center Extender turning up in more television sets; as the WMC interface becomes an in-the-gears option for interacting with the set, it's easy to fall in love with the things Microsoft has gotten right.

In Microsoft fashion, the company has accomplished this in part by pinpointing and exploiting the mistakes of its competition. If anyone in the US is a fan of their cable provider's channel guide, check that person for deer ticks -- simply put, cable providers know you're captive and they do to you as they will. And the experience is horrid. Microsoft, on the other hand, may often behave as if its consumers are captive, but in the case of WMC, at the very least, it treats those captives with kindness. It's touching.

Literally, it's touching -- one of the advances in the 7 version of WMC is the advent of touch gestures to get around guides and move through menus. For instance, multitouch content-skimming within a music collection managed via WMC proves a lot more appealing for me than using Cover Flow, the analogous activity within iTunes. It may be that the WMC demo had enough artists represented to trigger the excellent Turbo Scroll option (about 200, the presenter estimated), but I felt I was getting a far more satisfying glance at the system through Microsoft's eyes, and far more intuitively.

It seems too that Microsoft's picking up some smarts about how people use their collections. Playlists are better supported, and the ability to "pin" an album indicates that Redmond understands that sometimes there's something you just need to hear over and over for a while. And were I carrying a Windows Mobile device or the Zune, the ability to sync recorded TV content to either of those device would be powerful stuff for those addicted to DVR-style time shifting.

Best of all for the inveterate video-scrounger, Microsoft suspects that you don't want to have to figure out whether the show you want to pull from the Internet is on abc.go.com, hulu.com, or joesbarandvideo.com -- you just want to watch it, and it's WMC's job to figure out where and how. It does. Just like that. I may never be in the market for a Zune, but I can also cheerfully forget everything I've taught myself about digging up video online if Microsoft's going to do it so smoothly on my behalf.

Microsoft reps have a habit of talking up their big wins, such as their success in bringing Olympics coverage -- meaning coverage of all the events and not just those NBC programmers felt would draw the biggest ratings, to the WMC masses. They tell me that the average viewer of that Olympics coverage spent 5-6 hours watching, and that's astonishing (and, for users such as the Seattle-area parent who got to watch her son compete in judo at o'dark-thirty thanks to the service, kind of wonderful).

But the real wins for Windows Media Center are going to be much more subtle: A convert to the elegant programming guide here, a please-don't-make-me-search-ABC's-site-again refugee there. It's not a bad vision of the post-Vista world, not at all.