CTOForADay.com

Most venture capitalists, now that the .com boom has gone bust, hear the words "cultural change" and walk away. Cultural change in order to create a successful product is, has been, and will always be one of the single most difficult things to achieve in product development.

Microsoft is relying on you to change your habits. Wireless keyboards won't help - you're going to have to get very used to being a lot closer to that television, albeit a high-resolution one. You'll have to either change your computing habits, or your media consumption locale.

Don't sell that TiVO just yet.

Windows Media Center Extender, a technology that will wirelessly link computers running Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition with televisions, was the sole new product announcement from Microsoft in Gates' sixth year keynoting at CES.

Media Center PCs allow users to use a remote control to provide access via TV to photos, video, and music stored on their PC, as well as selected Internet services such as movie downloads. The Windows Media Center Extender removes the need to physically connect the TV to the PC or even have it in the same room.

Think about your own living room: your TV is probably too high up, or too low down. Your couch is across the room - and even if resolution wasn't a problem, text that far away just isn't going to be comfortable to read. Imagine using that convergence device every day - and think of just how many of the things we currently think a convergence device should do suddenly become very, very difficult.

Convergence, in this case, is nothing more than what your TiVO is pretty much doing already, with the difference being that your TiVO already does it. This "Media Center Extender" will efficiently extend the reach of Microsoft from the PC in your home office or study into your living room, while ensuring that you're going to buy an upgrade you weren't expecting to need, in an environment guaranteed to be less usable. Alternately, instead of buying a big, useless box, you can buy an XBOX, and achieve the same effect while simultaneously enabling the purchase of exactly one reasonable quality video game every two years.

Not everybody keeps that PC on. For years and years, from late versions of Windows 98, through all of the series of Windows 2000, and now into XP, Microsoft has quite literally struggled to provide an operating system that supports "sleep" - a half-quiescent state where the machine is on but using minimal power - and "suspend", where the state of the computer is saved to disk and powered down.

Now, when Microsoft has finally accomplished that capability in XP, answering (after many years) the needs and demands of its customers to be able to shut down their systems into low-activity modes, they go and implement something that will require that your PC not only never shut down, but be eternally on. A PC that's on whenever you want to watch TV, or listen to music. A PC that's on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (in a reasonably large house). A PC that you probably wouldn't want to use while your kids are downstairs playing video games, nor a TV that you'd want to be using your computer when you're in the middle of that long Word document that you just know is going to crash before you saved it.

And to boot? Just think of all of the fun you'll have going through your PC, trying to figure out what you can delete to make room for another episode of Will and Grace. Bobby downloaded a bunch of applications from the net, and installed EverQuest's six CDs worth of game data last night. Someone spent all of last night downloading Smallville over Kazaa, and now you haven't got enough room on your hard drive to live-pause long enough to answer a phone call.

This is NOT usability. This is not the kind of usability that people intended this stuff to be used with. And yet, Microsoft is so sure that you'll be upset about shelling out for what is, in reality, a dirt-cheap hard drive in a box that does all of this stuff without your computer that you're willing to upgrade your computer, leave it on 24 hours a day, deal with the change of use, and get poorer usability out of it. Microsoft has forgotten people's fear of technology; nobody's quite sure that getting a Blue Screen of Death on their TV is all that compelling.

I'm not saying convergence isn't a wonderful dream: I'm saying there's a direction these things need to happen in, and it's not one that's the current focus of these products. There's dream, and there's reality: The reality is, people today DO turn off their computers. People today DO do critical work on them, and play games, and a million other things.

And those things which do work demand, more often than not, that you change the way you do things to accomodate it. Stop turning off that PC. When you want to work, make sure nobody's going to start watching movies downstairs. Give up on running SETI - you're going to need those CPU cycles. Because now it's not your computer, anymore: it belongs to your whole house, and everyone in it is now using your computer.

This is the opposite of the way much of the initial research into the "wired home" has gone - "Ubiquitous Computing", often referred to by researchers as the Third Age of Computing: a term representing an idea whereby the computers are in everything around you, sharing information and performing your tasks; many of them, and one of you; you carry around a bunch of Star Trek slates and pads which act as user interfaces. In the world of ubiquitous computing, the computer embedded invisibly in your living room would be small; enough to entertain. When you wanted to work, you would go to your study, automatically using the bigger computer embedded invisibly in that room for those tasks. While futuristic, that kind of conversion associates the resources at hand with the places you do them, just as your house does today: Your TV is in your living room, your computer in the home office or study... when you want to watch TV, you move to the living room; when you want to use the internet, you move to the study. The environment matches the requirements and needs of the person doing the thing in question; and the environment is crafted to fill those roles and needs as the user wishes them to. It's an environment where the user innately understands and manages the usability requirements.

In opposition, the near-term equivalent of Microsoft's idea of convergence is making it possible for that TiVO Home Media system to not only run the TV, and record the shows, but offer a way for that content to be viewable throughout the rest of the house...

Hmm. It does that.

Ahh, but pictures... Hmm. Does that too. And music.. and radio... And it works with iTunes, on your Windows box.

Those bits and pieces of "convergence" are already sitting in your house. The problem for Microsoft is that your computer, in that house of today, is just another slave; another TV. Another dumb terminal to a smart box that's sitting in your living room. But one can argue that the living room is exactly where you want this to be: in a place where we already do these things, in an environment that doesn't require us to change our viewing habits to enjoy them, nor to change our computing habits to use them.

Home Media Option lets a Series2 DVR use your home network to play music stored on your computer. The music stays on your computer, so it doesn't take up space used for recording TV programs on the DVR, or interfere with any scheduled recordings.

Note the focus: TiVO has identified an important point, here. It doesn't interfere with what you already use your TV for. People using the TV expect nothing less than to be able to watch TV. Usability demands it. Making the TV more complex has never worked - not for any manufacturer to date. No product that has ever made the TV more complicated has ever taken off; many a people still don't record TV on their VCR because they can't figure out how to get it working - this is one of the things that TiVO got right, and it's one of the reasons people rely on it so heavily now.

Your computer is noisy. Your computer doesn't have a chair in front of it so remarkably comfortable that you want to spend your evening watching after you spent your whole day working on it. Your computer is ugly, complicated, and has lots of wires. None of these things make for a nice addition to an "entertainment center". None of them fit under your TV. And your computer, to boot, looks like hell on a TV - meaning you're either going to be rather wealthy and bust out a bunch of bucks for a very expensive toy, or you're simply not going to do it.

On the other hand, we've got Convergence, Mark II - a stack of little boxes, sitting under your television, connecting your computer to a bunch of music, video, and film stored on something on your computer. This bit connects your stereo to your MP3 collection on that hard drive; that bit connects your TV to the collection of movies and TV shows you've been intending to watch. And that computer downstairs? It's going to be on all the time, albeit in a different room, making all that noise that turned you off from putting it in the living room in the first place, with the added benefit that it's still going to be on 24 hours a day, and now you're going to have to chuck another hard drive in - because all that stuff costs storage, and you didn't know you'd be doing it when you bought that computer.

Or there's a third option. Stick with what works; if you went Sky Plus, then you've got a TiVO already, and you should probably just get on with it. If you don't have one yet, then buy one of the TiVO-based Freeview boxes coming out early this year. Or HDTV. If you're American, DirecTV. Plug it in. Turn it on. And not have to give a damn whether or not the comptuer is on, whether Billy is playing Counterstrike and preventing you from watching EastEnders, or whether or not recording that film will crash your computer while you're trying to answer e-mails.

Press the red button on your remote if you get the point.