4 ms·

there are many applications that Microsoft have included with windows that are very well thought out. Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) was just an app on top

there are many applications that Microsoft have included with windows that are very well thought out. Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) was just an app on top of XP/Vista/7 (though unchanged in 7, and then killed), but was is still so loved by those who use it that they figured out how to extract it from Win7 and install it on Win10. It was honestly the best media center experience I've ever used on a PC (Tivo might be better in hardware, but never had one and it puts ever other setup box from a cable company to shame). It's simply a shame that it wasn't used by enough users that microsoft stopped developing it and effectively killed it.

WorldMaker 6y ago
The impression I got was MCE was killed not because few users were using it, but that it took power users to use it. Efforts like Windows Home Server mostly just proved that average consumers didn't want to run and configure a server environment in their home. Very rarely did people trying to use the MCE have the hardware they needed to support all of its features well. That's why so much of the media control efforts got pushed to Xbox because at least with the Xbox they could control more of the hardware directly. (Then those efforts were sabotaged in the early days of the Xbox One by bad press, which was a terrible shame because they had a lot of great ideas half-executed.)