How We Got Here

Call it sibling rivalry. Ever since the personal computer arrived on the scene, it has displayed an irrational jealousy of its less intelligent predecessor, the television set.

To some degree, it's understandable. While one member of the cathode ray tube family was clearly the more gifted one, having played a pivotal role in nearly every significant human endeavor of the 20th century, its bumbling older brother ”the "Boob Tube" ”managed to steal the limelight every time.

Maybe this is why the PC industry has so cherished the dream of uniting these two devices: style and substance, together at last. Yet every attempt to add PC sophistication to television's mass appeal has left us yawning. With WebTV as the most recent example of a keyboard-equipped television experience, hybrid PC-TV devices have consistently failed to fire our imaginations or convince us to part with our hard-earned cash.

That's one of the reasons that the runaway success of the Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition PCs has been so surprising. As it turns out, we never really wanted a computer in our television set. We wanted a TV in our PC.

It seems like a subtle distinction, but it isn't. At least not for Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, and a growing list of PC makers . HP was the first computer company to sign on with what many in the PC industry dismissed as a harebrained idea ”just another hopeless attempt to marry the PC and the TV into a single "infotainment" device.

Although they'd never admit it now, I'm sure that industry observers were surprised, if not outright shocked, when people actually started buying these media-centric computers as fast as the manufacturers could build them. Perhaps the most surprising part is what they paid for them. Just at a time when every economic indicator was in the gutter , and computer sales forecasters were sounding more like weather forecasters who had just witnessed a groundhog see its shadow and dive for cover, people started opening their wallets in response to the new Media Center PCs. Few industry pundits guessed that consumers would keep pushing their shopping carts right past those $399 bargain PC specials and instead load up with a fully loaded Media Center machine costing $2,000 and up.

HP smiled all the way to the bank, as its Personal Systems Division turned, in one quarter, from an operating loss of $68 million to a profit of $33 million. Microsoft sent its OS designers scurrying back to their workstations to cook up a new and improved version of the Media Center operating system. Meanwhile, a slew of new hardware companies jumped on the Media Center bandwagon to try their luck at selling high-priced, high-performance media PCs. With the added injection of volume, prices actually began to drop, fueling even more demand.

But what of the consumers? How about those intrepid early adopters who have already taken a Media Center PC into their home and made it a member of their family? Have they achieved the "infotainment" nirvana they hoped for?

Although overall satisfaction with the Media Center systems appears pretty high, many consumers have been faced with the stark reality that these systems are quite complicated compared to a typical TV ”or PC, for that matter. In fact, there's little doubt that if televisions had been anywhere near as complex to set up and operate as a Media Center PC, most of us would still be gathered around our radios, warming ourselves by the glow of the vacuum tubes while we laughed along with some modern-day Fibber McGee & Molly.

Luckily, with this book you hold in your hands ” The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Windows XP Media Center ”help has arrived.