Microsoft is going solo after CE devices selling 50 million a year

posted Oct 26, 2009, 11:32 PM by Henrik Cort Tranæs   [ updated Nov 16, 2009, 1:30 AM ]



Steve Balmer recently said  in an interview at the  Engadget.com  show, that consumer devices that sell above 100 million a year such a computers, TV's and Phones suits their partner strategy. CE devices under 50 million units a year is interesting for Microsoft to go after themselves.. For Example Game consoles (Xbox), Portable media players (Zune) Keyboards and Mice. MS can enter those markets. What could that mean for Digital media players ? At the moment The expected sales of media players are estimated to end up at around 12-13 million units a year in 2013. Will Microsoft see this as a interesting market to enter on thier own? Could MS create a an Media Center Light, such as XMBC, and use the Cell hardware platform and then enter the market on their own? They are doing it right now with the Xbox platform. You can stream movies from Netflix and Movies from your home network to you Xbox that works as a media center Extender. However the Xbox stills lags some WAF factor and is quite noisy for the living room. But MS cloud revamp the Xbox experience and launch a more nimble media player without gaming. Most of the initial OEM partners have left the media extender market, such as Linksys and Pinnacle and HTPC's seem to be stuck in the DIY land. Their long time partner Intel, have left Microsoft OS in their CE4100 hardware platform realm and have instead choosen Yahoo for their software platform on Media Players for connected TV's

Comments