The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft sees a future on the small screen: "Series of grand schemes

Talk of a Microsoft TV platform may seem like déjà vu. Over the years, the company has unveiled one grand scheme after another to provide TV services.

It first tried to merge the PC and the TV with a ballyhooed system called Tiger that it announced with Intel in 1994. Oracle and other competitors scoffed that Microsoft didn't have the experience to deliver such a system. It couldn't even get the prototypes to work when Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated them to a utility association in Seattle.

'You can see it's not going to happen overnight,' Gates said at the time.

Then the company spent years developing sophisticated cable boxes. It also bought a California company called WebTV, which made devices for surfing the Web on a television, and continues to offer that service as MSN TV.

Partly to open doors with potential customers, the company invested more than $10 billion in phone and cable companies, including a $5 billion investment in AT&T, which later merged with Comcast. But that did little to move its early TV products.

Microsoft's cable boxes were ahead of their time. After cable operators scaled down plans after the tech bubble burst, the boxes lost potential customers. So far they're being used only by Comcast in the greater Seattle area and by three companies in Mexico."