Microsoft just keeps missing the mark with Media Center (MCE). It's been around since 2002-2003, but has never gained any significant traction. It's actually a

Microsoft just keeps missing the mark with Media Center (MCE). It's been around since 2002-2003, but has never gained any significant traction. It's actually a pretty nice product. The UI works well and is pretty simple to use; if someone can use a Tivo, they can figure out MCE's interface. The problem has always been the hardware and the marketing. When it first came out, you needed a dedicated PC to run it (unless you wanted to watch it on your monitor, thereby missing the point of the whole application), which was expensive (if you wanted it quiet) and painful for the lay-person to set up, especially considering Wifi wasn't quite up to the task (802.11b was what was primarily out there). To get around this, MS had a good idea with the Extenders, but again, the execution was horribly flawed. You still likely needed a spare PC and a fast network connection to stream data to the Extender. Additionally, the companies that made extenders tended to be Linksys and D-Link... not exactly companies busrting with consumer friendly/simple UIs. Plus they were another $200-300 addition. Plus, Extenders were never marketed well either because the manufacturers didn't have the money, or they just didn't care. Fortunately, MS did also build Extender functionality into the Xbox. But again, it is still some separate, hard to find mode on the Xbox. You have to pair it to a PC like you would a bluetooth device, and can be confusing for a non-techie. And once you have that done, now your Xbox has two different ways of playing music/video: One with the MCE mode and UI, and one with the native Xbox dashboard UI. Plus the Extender has to "connect" to your PC every time you want to use it. Perhaps the most damning experience I've had with it came when I showed it to a friend of mine. He's about as enthusiastic about technology as you can get, but didn't know about MCE. Back in 2007ish, after looking at it for 5 minutes he said: "This looks awesome, why haven't I ever seen this before? Good job Microsoft." Hindsight is 20/20, but they really should have made it 100% native on the Xbox, or released a similar device that didn't require a PC sync.