I’m sure everyone has the seen the to the cloud ad before, the one where the couple are sitting at the airport and decide to go “to the cloud” to access recorded TV shows from their home computer. It seems somewhat idealistic, but we all know it’s just not going to work at all.

The problem is that those recorded TV show files are HUGE, around one gigabyte for an hour. So could imagine transferring a gigabyte via your home internet connection? Not to mention these people are on a airport WiFi hotspot which was designed for Facebook and YouTube browsing; not saturating a pipe with WTV files.

Microsoft should of looked at this situation and thought that maybe the whole remote desktop solution to access your media centre is not really what the cloud is all about. Microsoft should of noticed the unfriendliness of this decided that a true cloud would allow Media Center to be accessed over a web interface or even a media extender client for Windows (which after 5 years still doesn’t exist despite the popularity of people owning multiple computers).

What’s even more weird about the lack of “cloud” for Windows Media Center is that Microsoft hired the developer of WebGuide to work for the WMC team. If you check out WebGuide you’ll find a complete package for enabling Windows Media Center for Vista to stream content off your box over the web. Did Microsoft just hire this guy and make him work on the pointless desktop client?

If both teams had sat down and reviewed that ad you would think that a lightbulb would go off in the head of someone there and released there’s nothing “cloud” about Windows; it’s all just terminal services with some fancy new features.