Chris wishes MCE a happy fourth birthday and posts this fun infographic:
Ah Media Center… We have been through a lot together :), always lots of ups and down. Unfortunately today marks a down day; I have a very recent build of MCE running at home and it’s crashing on average two times for every hour of ATSC DVR-MS playback. Not very confidence inspiring!
Someone wants to tweak the background color of closed captioning.
Lazy web request: I’m fairly certain there are registry tweaks for the closed captioning dialogs. I no longer have access to the e-mail from the program manager who knew about this and told me how to do it (and he’s no longer with the group). But if you poke around the registry you may be able to figure it out.
Once and for all: The Media Center team, the TV team and the Extender team (yes, it would have been a co-ordinated dev effort from all three teams) did not implement streaming of DVDs from PCs or changers for one big reason: Getting core functionality working on Vista was hard enough. And if, like me, you’re running an early build of Vista on you will understand.
And without doubt had there been extra time in the schedule there were many features of higher importance ahead of DVD streaming (DVD streaming is actually quite close to the bottom).
I know all you with changers wanted it (though I’m puzzled why you bought the changer in the first place? just get a fat NAS) but there’s not enough of you (and don’t get all chicken and egg on me. you still wouldn’t have bought a changer if we had the feature, you’d get a fat NAS).
Chris Lanier, Here It Is: My Thoughts on Vista Media Center:
This brings me to another point which has nothing to do with Vista, but Microsoft needs more transparency with its Media Center team. Since Matt Goyer it’s been very quiet. Of course, working on Vista should be Microsoft’s top priority, but anyone from the Media Center team reading this I would like to see you start blogging. Media Center has a growing community behind it, we need transparency with some of the issues and features that we (the community) feel you should be providing.
I am torn about what to write here. As you all know I occasionally blogged about Media Center and the digital living space. I also had a few co-workers who blogged about Media Center and Media Center’s development platform. Now, I can’t speak for the others, but I blogged because I wanted to. No one asked me to. It was just something I did, but it was not something explicity supported or encouraged by eHome management. Several times I did get e-mails asking to remove something and several times I got quite upset about blogging embargos even though the features had been disclosed (CES 06). But other than that I blogged and no one really cared (except the 1000 visitors a day who visited here :) ).
If you’re a beta newsgroup participant you will also notice that Media Center has lots of newsgroups and our beta co-ordinators spend lots of time and energy encouraging you to post. But how engaged was the Media Center team in the newsgroups? About as engaged as they were with blogging. Which means to say that aside from a one or two program managers who geniuely loved posting either to newsgroups or blogs no one else contributed. (Note to CWilli: You still owe me a gift certificate :) ).
But I’ll be honest. It’s hard to keep to keep up with the community. It’s something I’m passionate about and unfortunately when you’re expected to work 45+ hours a week on a project it’s hard to find the extra 5+ hours a week to seriously engage in community transparency through blogging, the newsgroups, or enthusiast sites like the Green Button. Though on the other hand the Media Center team has 40+ program managers. Surely between that many people there are enough people passionate about blogging that they can make it one of their core objectives. All you really need is one or two good bloggers per product group to make a difference in the community.
However, when I think about the investment not being made in blogging by eHome PMs I think about the investments they make in other areas. One that comes to mind is usability. eHome invests a lot of PM time and energy in usability studies. Now the PMs don’t really setup and run the studies, because eHome has dedicated usability engineers who do that, but it’s highly encouraged for PMs to attend the usability studies for their areas. But these studies that can soak up hours and hours of time (each session is usually two hours). Now they certainly get a lot out of those studies but if they traded off attending a few usability sessions for quality community time, their time investment would be the same but they would have a larger pay off through the added gain in transparency and a much larger audience reach.
Though of course one difference is that Microsoft usability participants are heavily NDA’d while they certainly can’t require that of their blog readers. But maybe Microsoft is too secretive? I certainly had to make a switch at my new job when I was working on a design and the CEO said to just e-mail it out to a bunch of customers to see what they had to say. And in my mind I’m like ‘but how do we know they fit our target personas?’, ‘have they signed NDA’s?’, ‘how will we compensate them for time?’, etc. Needless to say I spent twenty minutes writing an e-mail and by the next day already had a good number of responses back.
Where does that leave us? It leaves me thinking that unless either senior leadership in the eHome organization decide that blogging is important or a few random team members step up out of the goodness of their heart (Aaron Stebner is a rockstar blogger for the MCE dev community), the community outreach is going to suffer. (I was going to recommend how they implement a proper blogging strategy but first we’d have to have a discussion on how they need to re-factor their release plans).
But hey, Media Center is at least 1000x more transparent than Windows Media Player :).
Codename Nemo: Windows Live meets Media Center:
Codename Nemo is designed to be an add-on for Windows Vista (Home Premium and Vista Ultimate editions), that integrates Spaces, Messenger and Live Call into a UI designed for large monitors and TVs. Nemo essentially creates a Windows Live Media Center, and is optimized for use by Microsoft Media Center remote, as well as keyboard. Of particular note is the 3D Gallery view for browsing Windows Live Spaces, shown below, presumably built using the new Windows Presentation Foundation that will be included in Windows Vista.
See, it’s not the end of the world that we removed Messenger from Media Center on Vista :). Here’s a screenshot:
Seattle PI, Microsoft getting on its video Soapbox:
Microsoft’s MSN division is developing its own free site where people will be able to submit and watch videos. Dubbed “Soapbox,” it’s set to be released today for testing by invited users before it’s rolled out more broadly in the coming months.
One of the reasons I left Microsoft was because too often Microsoft’s strategy is to wait for a startup/competitor to test a market. If the startup proves to be successful, Microsoft then swoops in with a lowest common denominator version for the application and goes from zero to majority market share. Personally, I found this very frustrating because I love innovation, but I of course understood why it made fiscal sense and it’s why I continue to hold a sizable portion of my investment portfolio in Microsoft stock. Now keep in mind Media Center did not follow this pattern; we defined the PCs role in the living room. However, at the beginning of the year I rolled off core Vista functionality to work on future looking Media Center realted projects and eventually grew tired of our in ability to ship even copy cat functionality.
What does this have to do with Soapbox? It’s relevant because I do not hear people asking, ‘Where’s the Media Center version of Soapbox?’ I also don’t hear people asking, ‘Will Media Center play my Zune music?’, ‘Can I purchase Zune music through Media Center?’, ‘Why does iTunes let you buy TVs and movies and Microsoft doesn’t?’, ‘Why is Microsoft’s Apple compete story competing with what Apple released three years ago?’
Where is the connected home story so often pitched by Bill Gates? Sadly, I think there is a large possibility that new comer to the living room game, Steve Jobs, is going to kick Microsoft’s ass. (Notice how he’s carefully side stepping resource and legal time sinks like CableCARD support! But our UI really is superior). Though I have to say I do not think Apple’s pay per download business model will be the business model that succeeds. Just compare iTunes TV show download numbers to the amount of streams that content providers like ABC get for their on-demand advertising supported content. And so, I think the long term business model will be one built on advertising innovations (as much as I hate ads and want to be able to pay to remove them the majority of American’s disagree with me).
Consistent Vista Media Center UI Please:
For whatever reason, the Now Playing UI (for My Music) doesn’t match the rest of the Media Center UI. The background is blackish and very muddy looking.
This is the correct background. The team choose a different background to distinguish between ‘the browsing’ and the ‘now playing experience’. Since in MCE 2005 many screens in music looked very similar, i.e. album details compared to the now playing experience for an album, users could get confused and we wanted to clearly distinguish between the two.
On my personal blog I have a post with what I’m doing next: I’ve joined Redfin.
It’s probably odd for me to go join a real estate tech company instead of one in the digital media space but after working in the digital media space since 2001 (prior to Microsoft I founded two music related startups) it’s time to deal with a new set of challenges. Instead of fighting the record labels and movie studios it’s time to take on challenges like the MLS system and 6% comissions.
Though of course, I’ll still blog here from time to time. I still owe you all posts on the new media discovery wizards and a post on how we screwed up the different video libraries (oops!) and of course, how could I forgot, an exposé on why I really left!
Friday was my last day at Microsoft. How did my last week pan out? Monday I had a meeting with our group’s general manager and had a good discussion about why I was leaving and what the future looked like for both my old group and for myself. The nicest thing about leaving has been the resounding support from all levels of my management chain. We all wish things had turned out differently, but Microsoft just can’t compete with my new opportunity. Though it sounds like they’ll always have a spot for me if I decide the startup life isn’t for me.
After that meeting I sent out a note to my group with the subject ‘Leaving Microsoft’ (as a template I read through some of the Leaving Microsoft emails that ex-co-workers had sent.):
Thanks everyone for a great two and half years but the time has come for me to move on. Looking back I have learned a tremendous amount from all of you about what it takes to ship great software. I don’t think there’s any other group where I would have had the chance to ship three versions in such a short amount of time. I’m really going to miss working on such a great product, but even more I’m going to miss working with such great people.
Where am I headed? I recently accepted a program management position at Redfin, a real estate startup company in Pioneer Square. And so, this Friday is going to be my last day commuting over to the east side.
Hopefully my car can hold out for a few more bridge crossings because after Friday I’ll be able to walk to work :-).Please keep in touch,
Matt
I return I received lots of nice emails (many of you also sent nice emails and left comments), thanks!
I then took it easy for a couple days working just a few hours. Mainly I came in to have lunch with my friends. During this time everyone jokingly referred to me as a ’short-timer’. On Wednesday I took my Aeron chair home, because I didn’t want any co-workers stealing it thinking it was an MS Asset when it wasn’t. Thursday a small group of us went out for lunch. Friday was an odd day since it was the Friday before Labor Day. So not many people were in the office. But I showed up for a an hour, formatted my notebook’s hard drive (sad that all my specific knowledge about Media Center will be lost), and met one last time with my manager who gave me my review and ‘numbers’. I learned all about the promotion and raise I would have received had I stayed; oh well :). Then several people tried to get me to work but without a notebook and the long weekend looming that just wasn’t going to happen (tip: if someone you rely on is leaving approach them before their last day). Next a few of us went off to a big BBQ in the middle of campus and I got one last look at the thousands of people all working on Windows Vista. It was quite an incredible scene. I wish I had remembered my camera but I had a lot on my mind that morning hauling back lots of the equipment loaned to me over the years.
Later that day my friends held a ‘memorial service’ for me at The Chapel (local bar) and we drank from 5pm to 1am. A great time was definitely had by all. (Thanks for the Champagne Charlie!).
It’s without a doubt that I will miss interacting with some of my old co-workers on a day to day basis. Fortunately most of us live in the same neighborhood so I’m sure we will still hang out and get in trouble when not working.
Bye Microsoft. I’ll miss you! It was a great two and half years. And thanks for letting me sign up for the beta program :).
Some people nkow my blog better than I do. Check out Mike A’s analysis of my blogging habits over the past six months. Wow!
The other side of the story is that shortly after Christmas I moved off of working on Windows Vista fulltime and started working on a different project and so your speculation is just a little bit off :).
Comments(4)