Microsoft's Media Center mansion

The UK arm of Microsoft has rented a gorgeous £5m west London pad in which to showcase its own and its partners' products. They've called it, inevitably, the mHome. The house is a business marketing venture and is not open to the general public, but the company gave CNET.co.uk a sneak peak around the mHome before it opened its doors.

Unlike many of the digital home showcases we've seen, the mHome isn't the digital home of the future. It's the digital home of, well, right now: everything in the house is already available in UK shops. Microsoft didn't even use its own Media Extender technology because it's yet to arrive in the UK.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has an improbable mansion on the shores of Lake Washington that features carpets woven from the hair of silken monkeys, and a solid-gold nuclear power station in every room (or so I'm told). The whole point of the mHome, though, is to see what you can do with off-the-shelf products.

The project's manager, Microsoft's Windows marketing bod Simon Darby, reckons the kit in the mHome cost under £16,000, and that's a pretty small investment compared to the lavish property it graces. When I asked Darby what the owner of of this house did for a living, he replied, "Whatever he likes." I suspect some of the curtains cost more than the gadgets.

As we toured the house, slipping on our drool as we gawped at the sky-high ceilings and general air of civilised luxury, it was clear that its owner had been passionate about technology even before Microsoft knocked on his door. He had previously wired the house to enable audio in most rooms, yet this custom cabling job alone had cost £10,000 -- a sum which goes a long way when you start buying digital techologies. The house is now networked via a series of BT Voyager wireless hubs, which Microsoft couldn't praise highly enough. They were supposed to be temporary, but gave such good coverage they became the network infrastructure for the whole project.

So what's the mHome actually like? It's a bit painful: it's like a £5m house with a PC in every room. Microsoft has a two-word strategy for the digital home: Media Center. The grand downstairs living room had a Media Center PC, while the kitchen had a PC running Windows XP. The upstairs living room had a Media Center PC; the upstairs bedroom had one, too. So how excited you are about Microsoft's mHome is really a question about how excited you are about PCs in general and Media Center in particular -- which in my case makes mHome a bit ho-hum.

There were some fun toys: a VKB Bluetooth Virtual in the kitchen, which allows you to type on a flour-covered surface, to check a recipe online, say (we've all done it, right?). The most flash was the Philips Active mirror in the bedroom, which magically transforms, like the mirror in Snow White, into a PC monitor that displays the fairest weather and stock prices of them all. There were some dinky digital picture frames: you could be at the football, take a picture of the winning goal and email it home so it's ready to admire when you walk through the door. There was also Convergex Home Automation hardware and software nicely integrated within Media Center, so you can control room lighting and Web security cameras from your TV.

And yet, and yet... the painful truth is that the need to put Media Center at the, well, centre of every room makes for a rather flat tour. And although we admired the Samsung YEPP Portable Media Center and the various mobile phones and MP3 players sprinkled around the place, the overall impression was disappointing. Microsoft's vision of the digital home is a PC in every room. The whole point of Media Center is that it eats up so many of the things you might want to do in a digital home (music, TV, movies, games and photos) that it makes for a dull demo -- there are only so many ways you can put a PC in the corner of a room and make it exciting. Actually, I can't think of any. Let's face it, it's a PC.

Microsoft's vision of the present-day digital home is as exciting as the PC itself, at once very, and simultaneously not at all. The PC has been at the heart of the transformation of our digital lives in the workplace. At the same time, the PC no longer feels very exciting. It's enormous success means that we now take its advantages for granted, and no matter how nicely designed -- and there are some very pretty boxes now -- a PC is just a PC. People are proud of their new plasmas, their new iPods, their new Sony PSPs, but when did someone last say to you, "You've got to check out my new desktop PC"? (I'll give you the iMac, and some of the boy-racer, high-end gamers, but you get my point.)

The painful bit, the Emperor's-new-clothes bit, is that in our experience Media Center PCs can be a real pain in the neck for anyone who doesn't wear a t-shirt that says '404 Not Found'. Microsoft has paid beautiful actors and actresses to appear in a video shot at the mHome, and they run busily from task to task, checking emails, looking up recipes and loading Xbox games. They make using Media Center seem as easy as brushing your teeth.

Back in the real world, sometimes we brush our teeth with thrush cream by mistake, and sometimes certain people use our toothbrush to clean their confounded Ugg boots, which ruins the bristles. We know that setting up a Media Center PC should be an exciting, fun way to simplify our digital lives, but the fact is that getting a UK cable box to talk to a Media Center PC can be a gruelling marathon. Hell, getting a Media Center PC to output the right signal to a monitor, let alone a TV, can take several hours, and if Bill Gates (Bill Gates!) couldn't get his demo of a Media Center to work at CES this year, then this whole concept needs work.

So would you like to live in a Media Center mHome? Let me know at: