An inside view of the WebTV revolution that didn't happen

You might think it should have happened sooner. This week, Microsoft announced it would decommission its MSN TV (formerly WebTV) service. Even I didn't think it would last this long, and I was WebTV's greatest advocate back in the day. In fact, I was its official evangelist, hired by founder Steve Perlman and his company's PR agency as WebTV's national media spokesperson for a period leading up to and including the product launch.

In 1996, WebTV was tech's hottest startup, considered a blazing harbinger of the future, all for pretty good reasons. WebTV was primarily an internet popularization play during an era of widespread uncertainty about computers in the home and the value of being online. If tablets and smartphones represent a Steve Jobs-ordained post-PC era, WebTV can be seen in retrospect as a pre-PC computing category. In my view, it isn't modern web-connected TVs that finally killed WebTV (MSN TV) -- it's the mobile revolution that did it.

Filed under: Misc, Internet, HD, Microsoft

Comments

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/09/an-inside-view-of-the-webtv-revolution-that-didnt-happen/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

donovan mcnabb lottery ticket megga millions what is autism the giver march 30 rimm