Devices, Services Highlighted at 2006 CES

Previews of Windows Vista, digital media partnerships, and forthcoming mobile devices were among the highlights of Microsoft’s announcements at the Jan. 2006 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Although the company did not launch any major new products or initiatives, some announcements showed a tentative shift in the company’s consumer strategy: while the company still hopes to position the PC as a home entertainment device, it is increasingly willing to promote services and devices that do not require a PC.

PC-centric Stance Softening?

For the second consecutive year, Microsoft did not make any major product announcements at CES, but instead concentrated on third-party devices and services that use Microsoft technologies, such as the Windows Media Format. The company also demonstrated features of its next major OS release, Windows Vista (due in late 2006), such as integrated search and a new user interface.

But perhaps most striking were several announcements in which the PC was not the central device or played no role at all. This is an important shift: until now, Microsoft’s entertainment strategy has positioned the PC as the preferred device on which content is recorded, stored, edited, and transferred to other devices, even if this created some awkward scenarios. For instance, although the Xbox 360 game console uses a TV set as its display and has a built-in hard drive, it cannot record TV programs; rather, consumers must record TV on a Media Center PC, then transfer the recording over a home network to the game console.