Many people have been wondering if Microsoft will continue to include the Windows Media Center in Windows 8 or just axe it all together. Well now Steven Sinofsky, the president of the Windows division, confirmed in his recent blog post that the Media Center will be returning for Windows 8.
He also added that the Media Center won’t be included in any of the pre-release builds. As well as that, Microsoft won’t be including Windows 7 games, DVD Creator, upgrade setup and Dot Net 3.5 Apparently they won’t be included for engineering reasons as well as business decisions. Microsoft probably wan’t to ensure the OS is working properly before they start adding in these additional features.
Sinofsky also noted that they are hard at work trying to improve the quality and compatibility of the add-ins for the Media Center.
However one of the most interesting points he made was on how popular the Windows Media Center was. It turns out that just 6% of Windows 7 users launched Windows Media Center. The heaviest usage was in Russia, Mexico and Brazil. What’s more the majority of people are just looking around and not actually using the Media Center. Only 25% of the 6% used it for more than 10 minutes per session. 59% of users just used it for less than a minute or two – so probably launched it by accident or were just looking around it. The most popular usage for the Media Center was to watch TV unsurprisingly.
By comparison, the Windows Media Player was launched by 66% of Windows users in July and IE was launched by 88%.
So it looks like the Windows Media Center is here to stay for another edition of Windows, but judging by those usage figures, I wonder how much longer it will be around.
You can read Steven Sinofsky’s full post here
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