• by Ross Fadner , January 5, 2004

Seamless media has long been the dream of techie pioneer and global computer operating system dominator Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation's founder and CEO. At this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Microsoft, and fellow PC kingpin Intel Corp. are expected to unveil Gates and company's latest designs for global media domination.

Microsoft and Intel, leveraging the importance of the global event, are set to disclose a series of products that they claim will make it easier to use the PC to organize all media.

The announcement during CES, the tech industry's consumer electronics Mecca, should serve as a stepping-stone in the two companies' decade-long quest to embed Microsoft software and Intel microchips directly into televisions.

As consumers are rapidly adopting the transformation of music, photographs, and movies into digital formats that their PCs can manage and manipulate, the PC giants' initiative seems to be an increasingly likely possibility.

Leveraging that trend, Microsoft and Intel hope to realize their dream of total media convergence through the PC, which will run the TV, stereo, and DVD player. Imagine: Microsoft Windows as a navigation tool on TV screens.

Using wireless networks, several hardware makers have already facilitated the transfer of digital media from PCs to around-the-home devices such as stereos, TVs, and DVD players.

A media convergence involving the TV, America's default media consumption device, would certainly incite shaking in the boots of makers of other traditional media devices, who fear nothing more than the rise of a single PC-TV as the home's media hub for viewing TV, watching movies, listening to music, or viewing photos.

These producers of traditional media devices will hope that the PCs propensity for suffering from bugs, viruses, and crashes will keep consumers from embracing Microsoft and Intel's latest attempt at global media domination.

Currently, both Microsoft and Intel dominate their respective PC markets. Microsoft has a 97.46 percent share of the OS market, ahead of second place Apple, at 1.46 percent. Intel owns an 82.6 percent market share of the microchip market, ahead of Advanced Micro Device (AMD), which owns a 15.8 percent share.