Mike at Missing Remote wrote a great article on why Softsled, as a software Extender will never happen.  Foucsing on Mike’s last point in the article, the reason Softsled will never exist is because it doesn’t need to.  Instead, since every copy of Vista Home Premium and Ulitmate includes Media Center the real future is in media/resource sharing as I’ve talked about before.  So, a separate Software Extender will never be released.  However, Microsoft needs to focus on making Media Center work together on different machines.  Automatic media discovery for music, photos, and recorded TV, sharing of a central EPG, and even streaming of live content.

Everyone has been talking about Windows 7 coming in the second half of 2009. Call me crazy, but why does anyone care at this point?  Yeah, I know people want to ditch Vista ASAP and I think Microsoft wants to make the transition to, but Windows 7 doesn’t need to be rushed and frankly if Microsoft can ship any Windows release on schedule I’d be shocked.  How many times did Vista get pushed back and/or features cut?

I’ve been trying to find time to write a post about the downfall of HD DVD, but until I can get there here is some food for thought.  The day of native HD DVD support in Media Center is gone, even if released it would likely be useless in the long run.  Native Blu-ray support in Media Center will never come from Microsoft, never.  They will never build anything around Java, which Blu-ray requires.  The wait for native HD media playback within Media Center just grew amazingly long.