Thomas Hawk, Microsoft’s Charlie Owen Responds to My Media Center “Rant”

Part of the exchange is about when we are going to solve the problem of poor performance of music libraries:

While I can appreciate the secrecy and veil of product marketing that accompanies your process I see little harm in saying something like expect this to be fixed by x date.

Good news. Music performance has been significantly improved in Windows Vista Build 5219 (the PDC build). It wasn’t fixed earlier (i.e. Update Rollup 2) because we had major dependencies on Windows Media Player to fix the problem and our schedules did not align until the Windows Vista timeframe. Yes, we should have fixed it sooner, but Media Center is a very large software project requiring hundreds of people, has hundreds of dependencies on other components, and is working on a certain set schedule.