Digital Home Thoughts: Marcus Ash Discusses Microsoft's New Personal Media Center with DevBuzz

"Q: A few weeks ago when I first saw your demo, I was a bit dubious for about the first 3 minutes. My original impression was Microsoft going off in another direction just because some other company is successful there. I quickly changed my mind though once I heard the strategy and the plans for PMC. As someone who’s a fan of the iPOD, I saw something that would really scare me if I was working for Apple. I have my opinions on the specifics and I’ll ask you about a few of them shortly, but could you tell me what Your opinions are on the competitive advantage you have entering this market?

A: For Microsoft, PMC is really about completing an end-to-end experience around digital media. While music is the most popular and most abundant source of digital media content today, we decided to focus on building a next generation device that would allow a user to consume all of their digital media on the go. Microsoft is making big bets in digital media not just around music, but also around TV, digital photos, home movies and online video content. With great applications and experiences like Media Center, Windows Media Player, Movie Maker, Digital Image Pro and PhotoStory, the Windows platform is an extremely rich environment for digital media creation, management, storage and consumption. Add all of these digital media platform assets together and we think it makes sense to build a portable device that does more than just music..."

This is a great interview and I'd strongly urge all of you PMC naysayers to give it a read - it gives an insight into Microsoft's play in this realm, and reminds me again why, when they set out to build platforms, they usually find success.