A Microsoft employee was a little too quick to post some not so public information yesterday and it was gobbled up in no time. It looks like Bill will announce Live Drive and Windows Home Server at CES next month. I was under the impression that Live Drive had already been confirmed, but I guess I was wrong. In any event, it looks like it has been now. But this was the first I had heard of Windows Server Home. It is aimed at the media center market. Being a low cost media center that houses, music, files, movies, TV, but also does file storage, firewall, spam filtering, antivirus and handling patches. Running on Vista of course. For $500 I would certainly pay that, getting a media center up and running is something I have plans for in the next 18 months, even though I cannot stand movies. But I an only 1/4 of the house hold, and I only get so many vetos per year.
Much more details below.
Zack Whittaker, Microsoft contract employee, wrote a post at MSBlog regarding rumors and hints being passed around regarding Windows Live Drive and Windows Server “Home”. To catch everyone up: The guide to CES contains this promo:
It reads:
All together now.
Announcing a new way to share, protect, and store what matters most.
January 2007
The speculation goes in two directions, that this is either Windows Live Drive, a free online storage solution designed to unify all user content among the Windows Live services and open up new possibilities with all that free space, including online-document storage; or (sorry about the mouthful), it was about Windows Server Home, an “open secret” version of Windows Server designed for home networks, one designed for sharing media content.
MSBlog wrote a post about the speculation. That blog post has vanished, but former Microsoftie Robert Scoble grabbed it in his link blog, with I subscribe to and republishes all posts, and here it is:
This has got some bloggers and some hopeful’s rather confused. A few people have asked me “what does this mean?” and I’m here to explain. Kip from LiveSide wrote this, Long Zheng from istartedsomething.com wrote this (with some interesting theories), Robert McLaws from Windows-Now wrote this, and good ol’ Josh from Windows Connected wrote this. Unfortunately, rumours on the Internet are just as bad as the rumours about the most popular girl in school making out with someone behind the bikesheds after school… Let’s clear this up shall we?
There is going to be a home server product along the Windows Server System operating systems. Sources have confirmed but refuse to comment further on the product. However Windows Server “Home” is not the final product name, but it certainly gets the message across that it’s for home users. What I have managed to dig around and find out, is that it’ll have certain sharing features. Media will be a big thing, it always has and always will be. I was working with someone in the Microsoft London office in August and we both came up with - porn, gaming and media are the big things on the web. We can’t do porn, we can do gaming (and since Xbox Live rocketed) and now media.
We may be seeing a shared Media Center - we may be seeing integration directly with Windows Live Drive from the operating system. What’s clear is that this new server operating system will most likely look and behave like Windows Vista, but with a few server things thrown in for the novice user (wizards to guide users through server operations) as well as the more advanced things for advanced home users. it’ll have gaming facilities to play online using Xbox 360 consoles, it’ll have the Windows Live Media Center in with it (if both schedules finish on time), and it should have all the features that Windows Vista Home Premium has.
It is not yet clear whether Windows Server “Home” will be announced at the CES 2007 conference or not. We just simply don’t know. It might… but maybe not.
Windows Live Drive will not be released either in beta, public beta or at all at the CES 2007 conference in January 2007 in Las Vegas. It’s simply not ready yet! Since the re-organisation of Live internally (and yes, it’s still going through the teething processes), there’s nothing been happening really with Windows Live Drive for a couple of months now according to sources.
Windows Live Drive, however, will be making an appearance at the CES 2007 conference in January 2007 in Las Vegas. Just because it’s not ready to be released doesn’t mean that Microsoft can’t shower all you techno geeks with a little bit of sunshine It’ll be mentioned, it’ll be talked about, prepare to be killed by numerous PowerPoint shows and you may even be lucky enough to see a demonstration of Windows Live Drive if they’ve managed to put it together in time. It’ll be formely announced, but nothing much more.
Windows Live Drive is scheduled for 2007. No quarters, no halves, just in 2007. There’s a huge backend operation going on - huge server farms being built, huge servers being installed. Windows Live Drive was one of the first Live services, but because it’s so big and complex, the software wasn’t even starting to be written until early this year.
Okay, to sum, up, this is what we call, a huge leak. The post, if it doesn’t come back, Zack has accidentally blown one of the reveals of Bill Gates’ CES keynote, that Windows Live Drive will be revealed, but not released, at CES. He also confirms that Live Drive will ship next year, and that they don’t know when, since the back-end involves so much work.
Zack has also confirmed Windows Server Home, while saying that it may or may not be revealed at CES (probably depending on time of the presentation and how close the product is to shipping). Server Home, or whatever it ends up being called, looks like a huge product, one that will make it possible to have an out-of-the-box centralized server experience in the home.
Home Server will ship with a version of Windows with all the features of Vista, designed to be a “low-cost/low-profile server”, with central storage for media and documents, handling patches, firewall, antivirus, spam filtering, easy to expand hard drive space, TV tuners and video streaming, and take away that home server market from older dummy Linux boxes.
In theory, Microsoft could sell this at a low cost, making it in such a way that it promotes the sale of multiple Vista PCs (and only work with Vista, thus preventing it from being used to power a Linux network). In that case, the box would only need large hard drives, processors capable of transcoding fast but not optimized for applications, no advanced graphics capabilities, and the such.
I want to have a dream Media Center setup, recording TV and enjoying my Windows DVR, but running Media Center on the same PC I do work from is a pain on performance. i would buy a $500 Home Server, as long as I knew my only problem was adding storage and tuner cards. Microsoft could make the home media experience perfect with a cheap Home Server, Vista Premium PCs, Media Center Extenders and the Xbox 360. Picture it, run through the options, and you’ll see it is virtually a dream come true for home entertainment.
Here’s the blog post as caught by Bloglines. I’ll update if he restores it, but it looks like it was pulled since it spilled the beans:
