Connected Home - It's Super!
Michael Toutonghi, Corp VP and Distinguished Engineer, New Media Platform Division, Microsoft, followed Allchin to give the dog and pony show on the connected home. Michael was very excited, and tended to use the word super a lot, but apart from the feeling that we were at a pep rally, he did give us some meat on Freestyle.
Another highly excited Microsoft executive, Michael Toutonghi, takes to the stage to tout the connected home.
Using a remote to look through My Music, My Pictures etc. folders on a start up screen that looks more like a simplified drop-down menu, Toutonghi and Molly Stone of Microsoft showed how using Microsoft's new best friend, the remote control, could turn a PC into a CD Jukebox. In the My Picture part of the demo Stone kicked off a slide show from a family album using the remote. Always that damn remote. I think they called it a "great community experience." Which means that guys will now get to surf their hard disks as much as their cable connection. Other features included the kind of stuff we've come to expect from products like the All-in-Wonder and Personal Cinema: an electronic program guide (EPG) and a personal video recorder (PVR). It all had the feeling of déjà vu, but in a strange way, the remote control did take your mind off the fact that you were dealing with the PC so, Freestyle's greatest accomplishment may be its psychological impact.
This is the Freestyle start screen for XP. It seems almost trivial, but Freestyle takes the XP interface and simplifies it for a remote control mentality. What do you want to watch? Surf pictures, audio, television, or video.
It seems like a bit of overkill for XP, but how else are you going to make it consumer friendly?
Otherwise, it is hard to tell how the PC platform is being advanced by Freestyle, apart from making the PC remote control friendly, and maybe that is the killer app. Sometimes it is that simple. For PC enthusiasts, it's nothing new. For everyone else, it might be a refresh that changes the way they view their PCs.
