Thanks Jacques.
It's hard to ignore the fact that Microsoft has been on a roll lately. The company's current and upcoming products are vast, full-featured and in many cases, hard to explain simply because of the wealth of new and improved features they offer. I noted this problem in my Windows .NET Server 2003 review, and I'll add a similar caveat here as well. Windows Media 9 Series, a complete end-to-end platform for digital media solutions that spans every possible hardware platform touched by Windows products, is big. It's really big. It's going to affect virtually every Windows user, in ways that are exciting and fun. And I'm going to miss something important in this review, I can just feel it. There's just so much going on here.

So hang on, it's going to be a long ride, one that I'm splitting into multiple parts, and releasing over the next week sequentially. But before we get started with Part One, let's take a look back at the history of Microsoft's digital media efforts. In the early days, when companies such as Apple, with its Macintosh and QuickTime efforts, and Commodore, with its powerful multimedia Amiga systems, were literally making some serious noise, most PCs were capable only of simple beeps and bloops. It was an embarrassing state of affairs that was only partially solved by several proprietary DOS-based solutions. With Windows becoming the PC standard of the early 1990's however, Microsoft decided that native digital media playback had to be part of the OS. And that's where our story begins.