because MCE is a jack of all trades and master of none. dont get me wrong I view MCE through a high end projector on a 13'x6' wall sized image and I think its cool as hell. Heck I watch the build status of a project i manage through an RSS feed on it every monring to know how much time I have to get to the office. I can, however, understand "ho hum attitude towards it".

Its expensive. In Canada you can either buy an expensive pc that is about double a comparable pc without the MCE capabilities or you have to have access to MSDNU. Again another expensive proposition unless you happen to be in the business.

The value of its features are in stealth mode - my wife can't really distinguish in capabilites between her VCR, the psuedo PVR capabilites of our Digital Cable Box, and the MCE TV stuff. As my wife told me when I was showing off MCE last weekend at a dinner party. "dear you can only watch one program at a time...." Ditto if you compare the music capabilites against a laptop with iTunes or winamp, the value proposition just isnt there...

the biggest problem though is "developer, developers, developers, developers..." - until a few days ago i dint even realize there was a special SDK to work with it. the dhtml/xml part is a stroke of genius too bad only 12 people outside of redmond really know about it.

I answered mat with this comment:
the greenbutton web site is a good starting point, building a communtiy around MCE
Part of the problem is Microsoft's product names
the MCE is a bit of a long name and not seen as cool as ipod for example.
Also the marketing for it is very poor (as least in the UK) I have seen very few ads for it in any of the PC mags apart from the resellers.
PC Wold and other store don't seem to understand it

Also sending swag out would help. I still have my Windows Media Mogal cap from '98 and some MCE t-shirts and other stuff for the enthusiats like me would be good, I am speading the word as fast as I can

So come on MS start getting some stuff out to us geek fans :)

Geek cults (especially in this young area of digital media) all start around the hobbiest. The guys who like to tinker and tweak. MS made a major tactical mistake in not releasing MCE as a boxed product. None of the people who are seriously interested in this kind of thing want to spend 2 grand on a box when they know they could build that does more for less than half that.

Obviously MS has realized this mistake and made 2005 accesible to those folks, but in that time all of MCEs competitors have played catch up and come quite nicely into their own. It's a tough place to be in right now. But I do think the polish on this product shows and given some time the community will really start to grow.

The one big upside MCE has is that if you're building a new box, it is actually a great value compared to buying a copy of WinXP and one of the other choices.