[The following is a copy of a forum post on rAVe Publication's forum that I wrote. That post was modified from an email I sent to Gary Kayye.]

I read Gary Kayye’s summary of the DSE show, which was very nice. I was particularly interested in his comments about the absurdity of using Windows XP and small PCs as a platform for players. While I have a great deal of respect for his opinions, here he was completely off base and I would like to know where he got his data.

First let me say, I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro. All of my developers, except one, use Mac Pros. The one who doesn’t uses Ubuntu Linux. Nobody at Tightrope is a Microsoft Fan Boy/Girl.

In the late 90′s and early 00′s there was pressure by IT departments for DS companies to move away from XP. They wanted, at the very least, Embedded XP and what they really wanted was Linux. The thinking was that Linux was much more stable, cheaper and wasn’t chock full of viruses and worms. Now the trend is exactly the opposite. Unless you have a really well established proprietary system that an IT department already knows, many organizations are going to a No Black Box Policy. If they cannot administrate it, they will not put it on their network.

In that spirit, here is my over-long rant on why Gary Kayye is wrong about the folly of putting PCs in as players:

Nothing is easier to administrate than XP.

With the exception of Apple and Google, there are probably no fortune 1000 companies that don’t have thousands of XP boxes on their network. The tools to push updates to them, lock them down, remote administer them and otherwise manage them are very well established. We purposely use Windows XP For Embedded Systems because it is the full copy of XP Pro, which means that Altiris or any other remote management system can manage it. It becomes a part of their standard desktop process, so virus protection and patches get rolled into their regular work flow. Easy.

How do they manage a proprietary Linux system or even Embedded XP? They Can’t. You might say, “They don’t need to manage a Linux box because it’s an appliance!” This is true, until something goes wrong and they do. There are plenty of worms and viruses that are written for Linux, the main difference is a matter of quantity and what can be done once infection happens.

Try getting a proprietary box onto a defense contractor’s network, and you’ll
see exactly what I mean. It may seem ironic to some, but XP is considered more
stable and secure because it is known.

A proprietary system is only worth what the company who sells it is worth.

Companies that make proprietary boxes have to make their own update and patching tools. You are absolutely tied to that company’s ability to release quality maintenance tools that actually work and on the methods that they use. Don’t want to send 500 megabyte disk images to 200 players on your network? Tough. Need a system that works through a proxy server? Tough.

With a platform as mature as XP, you have thousands of tools to choose from.

And if your DS company goes belly up? Your players are at best a bunch of PC’s with a worthless operating system on them. If your players use proprietary hardware, you have a bunch of black boxes that you hope are lead free so you can dispose of them cheaply.

A non-PC system does not have the ecosystem that a PC does.

PC-based players have the entire universe of consumer products from which to leverage. You can use television input devices designed for home theater systems. Graphics processors, video codecs and drivers are written for Windows first, then for other platforms. Direct X is now in its 10th generation and even on-chip graphics processors now support it.

With a proprietary system, you’ve got lock-in, which is great for the manufacturer and a risk for the customer. I know of no proprietary platform that is able to meet the cost/performance of a basic PC system. If you want to say “Mac Mini”, I would point out that it is, at heart, a PC.

Most of the security issues surrounding XP are not applicable to digital signage.

Close to 100 percent of the worms and viruses on XP require the user to have an unpatched machine and/or go somewhere and do something to infect the computer.

Between our broadcast products and our video servers, we have thousands of XP machines working 24 hours a day. If we had anything like the kind of problems that Mr. Kayye suggested, we’d need an army of support people just to deal with worms, viruses and BOSDs. In the 12 years that we’ve been around, we’ve had to deal with those kinds of issues two times, both fixed within 8 hours of discovery. We’ve had isolated viruses with individual customers maybe a dozen times and we have never had an issue with our Carousel Players, primarily because they just sit on the network and listen on specific ports for Carousel data. They aren’t connected to the Internet, they aren’t directly used by humans and they don’t have any high profile services installed (SQL Server or IIS, for example).

The instability of Windows is overblown.

I prefer Apple’s approach to the user experience and am an extremely satisfied convert from Vista/XP. That said, the stability of my Apple laptop is no better than the stability of XP or Vista, which was very good. Gary speaks of “Windows diseases (i.e., the blue screen of death, viruses, freeze-ups, etc.).” Even the BSOD was on the first incarnations of the MacBook Pro. Every other malady described in his summary is present and accounted for on any non-trivial system. The words “kernel panic” are not foreign to most Linux users. Is his laptop really locking up every day or catching a virus? Maybe Gary is visiting different web sites than I am.

There is no way you can build a business on top of Apple.

The truth is, XP is the most mature platform available for sale today. Nobody does a better job catering to developers, especially OEM developers, than Microsoft. The hardware market for their products is total and it is cheap, easy and predictable to ship a PC box with XP on it.

A manufacturer cannot get any kind of product life-cycle guarantee from Apple. Tomorrow they could up and decide to sell Mac Minis in a different form factor, kill the Apple TV and otherwise completely disrupt whatever DS plans the DS company had that involved Apple’s products.

Furthermore, Apple doesn’t even want that business. The last thing that they want is a bunch of AV integrators buying their $149.00 Apple TV as a digital signage player, only to never have those units touch an iTunes account.

No sane person would build a business on that hardware, as awesome as it is for consumers.

BTW: We sell our solutions as software only and many of our customers love using the Mac Mini as a DS player for Carousel, after the install XP on it, of course.

So, is there a place for small, non-PC players? Absolutely! If you need something simple or to play only a known video codec, then a PC may be overkill. Some people prefer the Linux approach either because they are familiar with it or because it’s often cheaper to buy. All of that is true and a PC is an excellent, stable and extremely simple-to-manage platform for digital signage players.