14 DAY TRIAL // As we reported to you last weekend, Microsoft was believed to be planning the killing of Windows Media Center, which was one of the easiest ways to bring Windows in the living room ever since Windows XP got to see daylight.
Now in a statement offered to us this morning, a company spokesperson has confirmed that Windows Media Center is being phased out, citing the decreased usage as the main reason for this.
“We are excited to bring many compelling new features for our customers this summer including Cortana and Microsoft Edge with a free upgrade offer to Windows 10. We can confirm that due to decreased usage, Windows Media Center will not be part of Windows 10,” the statement reads.
In other words, working on Windows Media Center for Windows 10, either as a stand-alone SKU or as an add-on (as it was offered in Windows 8), makes absolutely no sense because only few people use it, so the company instead prefers to focus on other features that would come in handier to users.
Not the only phased-out feature
Despite the fact that Microsoft is bringing back the Start menu in Windows 10, not all features that users requested and that were part of previous versions of the operating system will be reintroduced in the upcoming release.
For example, besides the Windows Media Center add-on/SKU, Microsoft is also giving up on the Windows Experience Index, a feature that was around in previous Windows versions to allow users to determine the performance of their computers without installing additional benchmark solutions.
As is the case of Windows Media Center, Microsoft states that the decreased usage of Windows Experience Index is the main reason for giving up on this feature in Windows 10, explaining that there are several other third-party alternatives out there that could pretty much do the same thing, so there’s absolutely no need for such a feature in Windows.