Thanks to some a-holes running a DOS against Dave Winer’s comment server, Scoble is asking for the Media Center wish list:

Since my comments are down, come on over to Channel 9 and tell us what you want in Media Player. Or, write on your own blog. Or talk on your podcast. Or shoot on your vblog.

So what should be in Windows Media Player 11?

- What does Apple do that Microsoft doesn’t do (often)? Make aesthetically pleasing stuff. Time to redesign the Media Player. It’s about as interesting looking as a pet rock. Open the M$ vaults and pay for some really cool looking default design. And get rid of the standard gray tabbed option boxes, please. Those things are 1995. Yes, I realize WMP can be skinned without too much trouble, but the default skin shouldn’t be the plain design, it should be something slick and cool looking. The first look should be “wow!” instead of “oh.”
- Quit with the default checked page take overs on installation. If users have to uncheck a bunch of boxes to stop their homepage and default search from being changed that’s irritating.
- Encourage more third party plugin / APIs development. Hire some developers who are bloggers and have their sole job to build cool stuff to plugin to the Windows Media Player. New free tools every week! Do a better job answering the question: why should developers develop/write plugins for Windows Media Player?
- What Apple did with Dashboard was a brilliant marketing move. Here’s an idea: Microsoft buys Konfabulator. Fight fire with fire, boys! Get people building more cool stuff for Media Player. That Batman Begins skin was very cool, we need to see more of that and by getting designers and developers excited will pay huge dividends. One of Microsoft’s biggest challenges isn’t features and functionalities, it’s working to be cool again. It’s not cool any more in too many people’s eyes. To be cool they need to do more of what they did last week with the RSS 2.0 extensions and less of what they did with the Longhorn screenshots being yanked.
- Less features — please — not more. Simplicity and speed is so important and that’s something Media Player has gotten worse at over the years. Typical Microsoft bloat as something new comes out, there is more emphasis on new features than paring back the ones that people don’t need or use. Make those features easy one click plugins so that the out of box experience allows users to do a cafeteria style media player. Give the users the power
- The playlist editing functionality in Windows Media Player is not as user friendly as it could be. It should be extremely simple and painless to make playlists, share playlists with family, friends or even another computer. More people are running LANs at home these days so Windows Media Player should make it easier to work across a LAN. Also an easy way to generate RSS feeds of playlists using the new RSS 2.0 extension (I imagine this feature is already planned) so bloggers can share their playlists through their blogs. I realize it’s easy to do through MSN Spaces, but think about non MSN Spaces blogs.

I could go on but there’s just a few key things for the Windows Media Player 11 team to chew on and consider. Readers, what do you think? What would you like to see in Windows Media Player 11? What would make your use it more? There are a number of really good posts at Channel 9.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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