Will Moxi fail?

Phillip Swann, who we thought mainly stuck to dissing celebs for how bad the look on HDTV, has penned a column panning Comcast's decision to start offering Digeo's Moxi Media Center to its cable subscribers. He says Moxi is doomed to fail because it tries to do too much and that the average person is likely to be overwhelmed by all of its functionality; he even lamely trots out that old cliche of how the average person can't set the clock on their VCR
(c'mon Phil, you can do better than that!). It's funny, they used to say the same thing about TiVo — that it was too complicated for anyone to use — but now Swann's complaint is that Moxi isn't enough like TiVo, and that Comcast should be marketing it as a digital video recorder rather than this all-in-one digital entertainment hub. We'd be inclined to agree with him, except that the Moxi isn't meant to be the only fancy digital set top box that Comcast offers to its subscribers, it'll simply be the one that the power users go for. Most people are going to want just a regular old digital cable box, a lot of people will want one with a hard drive for recording TV shows, and a few early adopters will take the plunge and opt for the Moxi, and get the most bang for their buck. It might take the general public a few years to acclimate to this stuff, but they will, just like they have for digital video recorders.

[Via Atmaspheric endeavors]