- 17 June 2006
- 1,621
MCE passed a big milestone this past week. Microsoft just announced at Digital Life that they now sold over 20 million units of Windows XP Media Center Edition:
It wasn’t that long ago that we announced 10 million… early April, I think… so the growth is significant and still ramping as we go into the holiday season. If you think about comparisons in volume – the installed base of Tivo, for example (eg. just over 2 million standalone PVRs) – it’s both an accomplishment we’re proud of and an ‘economic factor’ that we think will fuel a lot of continuing innovation on the platform like much of the 3rd party work that many of you have written about in the past.
When we talk to content providers, PC vendors, device vendors, etc. etc., obviously one of the things that guides their investment in our platform is how ‘big’ it is from a volume perspective, and I think along with the growth we’re seeing right now will be a ton of super fun and interesting innovation both on the XP platform and on the richer, more capable Windows Vista platform when it’s widely available. (and it’s worth mentioning that all the Media Center PCs that ship this holiday will be “Vista Premium Ready”, so they will be a great platform for Vista as well.)
It wasn’t that long ago that we announced 10 million… early April, I think… so the growth is significant and still ramping as we go into the holiday season. If you think about comparisons in volume – the installed base of Tivo, for example (eg. just over 2 million standalone PVRs) – it’s both an accomplishment we’re proud of and an ‘economic factor’ that we think will fuel a lot of continuing innovation on the platform like much of the 3rd party work that many of you have written about in the past.
When we talk to content providers, PC vendors, device vendors, etc. etc., obviously one of the things that guides their investment in our platform is how ‘big’ it is from a volume perspective, and I think along with the growth we’re seeing right now will be a ton of super fun and interesting innovation both on the XP platform and on the richer, more capable Windows Vista platform when it’s widely available. (and it’s worth mentioning that all the Media Center PCs that ship this holiday will be “Vista Premium Ready”, so they will be a great platform for Vista as well.)