> The difference is that there is a rather large demand for many of Elton John's songs

This whole thread appears to flatly contradict that idea.

That is why the music industry is whining.

They're whining that they can't milk the cash cow after 40 years.

I suspect that everyone that has any interest in buying a copy of something representing Elton's work has already done so and did rather a long time ago. That particular well is tapped out and they they can't "frack" it with another change in formats.

Many people aren't particularly attached to some random performer. Those that are likely already have an aging collection of CDs or MP3s. The rest are content to listen to things "for free" just like they always have since the dawn of radio nearly 100 years go.

Beyond that, what the music industry really needs to worry about entirely new forms of distraction that have arisen in the last 40 years.

The entire subgenre of music I used to listen back to in the great heydey of paying for physical media were all bands that had to do their own marketing before the labels would even look at them. Even that only came because a lot of 3rd party marketing that occured outside of the label system with underground clubs and tape trading done by mail.

Record labels abuse the talent and then corrupt the law.

As soon as you acknowledge DOS an a proper OS then you've opened the door to pretty much anything.

See, the introduction of the GST was to coincide with the bundling of a bunch of other taxes into one. For some goods, most notably electronics and "luxury items", they actually got cheaper. This was because it's truly a stealth tax on the poor, by taxing commodities like bread and orange juice (which previously would have been taxed at lower rates or even subsidized),

Bread and orange juice are not subject to GST.

...except the problem with all of that is this is being driven by idiot savant musicians that don't understand that there's a money grubbing middle man in between them and Spotify. What the artist gets and what Spotify actually pays are two different things.

And that's not even getting into the problem of assigning a reasonable value to a single impression.

On the other hand, MCE was always total pants when it came to outside media handling. This is an area where XBMC is especially good at. XBMC is pretty much the gold standard here. Whereas MCE is a bad joke. Even the (multiple) plugins to address this problem don't do well enough.

Then add in the modern streaming services and it's even worse. They are numerous enough that supporting them is difficult, plus PC options for accessing streaming services are all pretty much terrible (Flash & Silverlight).

Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu and friends all make your cable provider moot. They provide the same interface as what you can cobble together with a Tivo and a really large hard drive.

Tivo and everything else like it was really just a stopgap measure between conventional TV and a full on-demand experience.

It's just the nature of the beast. ANY app that provides that sort of "re-startable" viewing experience is going to have to spy on you just a little. There's no getting around it.

The entire system to support MythTV including full desktop GUI support, the command line, and the IR remote interface system as well as things like database support and a full build environnment clocks in at a whopping 4G. It doesn't have to be a bloated pig.

Your one liner insult is not nearly as impressive as you think it is.

The OP has a point. Microsoft has the resources to push into all areas equally. They can "waste" resources maintaining consistent UIs for a number of different form factors. Certainly for their own products, they can make everything usable with any interface you can mention or even allow for translation layers.

They're just disinterested. MCE is the perfect example of that. It was always very promising but they never really ever committed to the idea.

No. There are any number of use cases on the PC that use or require more horsepower. Gaming is an obvious one. So is the use of bleeding edge media formats. The whole point of a PERSONAL computer is that these use cases can come from anywhere and end up a killer app (like the spreadsheet).

Gut the system and turn the ecosystem into a prison and you sabotage that.

You jest but your proposal isn't so absurd. The Carribean is where old cars from the mainland go after they become too ratty for spoiled 1st worlders. Canadians doing a study there also doesn't seem so strange since my own alma mater has an outpost there.

Besides, there are these things called boats and planes.

While smug vegans are an occasional annoyance, the microfine pollutants thrown off by poorly maintained trucks seem like a much more clear and present danger to you or me. It's always intruigued me why my car's air filter didn't do a better job at masking trucks that smell like they can't pass the state pollution inspection. Just add that to the long list of carcinogens.