Numerous manufacturers have been introducing these systems over the last year, adding to the systems introduced by pioneers Escient and ReQuest in the late 1990s. In addition, the Media Center PC is poised to become a key platform of choice among dealers.

There's lots of statistics in this article if you're interested in the home media server space.
3:37:49 PM   []

Fortunately, this talk dovetailed nicely with the MVP's hitting the Redmond campus. So later that day I rounded up Nishant, the tester who sits next door to me and we went to have dinner with the MVPs. And then the next day I sat in on the conversations they had with our team. We shared with them demos of Rollup 2 (set to launch very soon), and demos and our plan for Windows Vista. In turn they shared with us a long laundry list of compliants about our product and platform.

My feedback to them, and you, is, don't wait until you're invited to Redmond to give us feedback :). Send me an email (Matt.Goyer *at * microsoft.com), write a blog post, or leave a comment here. Yes, the newsgroups are an option, but I know very few of us spend time on The Green Button or in the newsgroups. This of course should change, but I barely have enough time to keep up with blogs, never mind those forums.

Peter Near, from the city of Waterloo, where I went to school, was up and got a look at 'Vista MCE' and has this to say, Vista MCE looking great!:

It looks mahvelous and is incredibly usable. I’m genuinely excited now about the Vista version of Media Center, and can’t wait until I get my hands on a new official build so I can share some screenshots with you guys. You’re gonna love it!

12:05:26 PM   []