Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Ok, so everyone is talking about Microsoft Home Server, announced at CES. The Home Server will live in your closet and simplify your life:

As a small, headless box that lives on your network and in your closet, a Windows Home Server can quickly grow the pool of storage from which all of your shared files for each of your users lives. The backup engine in Windows Home Server also silently backs up the entirety of each machine connected to it every night.

But this line caught my attention:

And because the data is always online, using the built-in remote access abilities, you'll also be able to access your data from any machine on the planet.

Now I'm sure that Microsoft expects Home Server to be their entree into my home entertainment system, but I don't have a "data". I have movies, photos, and music. Like the majority of people, I watch a television, and not a PC. And I have TiVo. We also have both Playstation and XBox.

As far as my home network goes, we have multiple laptops but only one Windows PC, so Home Server really won't work for me at all.

What I need is a box that is capable of storing all of my music, my DVDs, and any other media I have centrally in my home so that I can select and watch or listen to anything I want in any room on any appropriate device.

If I own a copy of Pirates of the Caribbean and I want to watch it on my bedroom TV I should be to select it and watch it, rather than having to go find the DVD and put it in my DVD player. I shouldn't even need a DVD player. A simple TiVo-like menu should make it easy to access the content using the remote control - just like I do now.

It's probably pretty reasonable to state that 99% of people do not want a Home Server, any more than they want a home network. They just want to be able to easily get their music, movies, pictures or whatever - whenever and wherever they want. And they don't want to have to buy a bunch of PCs to be able to do that.

They'll buy a set-top box or TiVo or maybe an XBox, but it has to be simple to use. Make it as simple as when I click on the remote for my MacBook and most people will be pretty happy.

If you keep thinking of every problem as a PC problem, then you'll solve every problem with a PC solution.