I guess investing a lot of time and money into any product is a risk of sorts, since any company can go belly up. But CQC definitely is not a fly by night company or anything. It is continuing to grow and improve. The 1.2 release just went up a couple days ago, and the upcoming releases will bring some major new features.
Given the price, if you are going to take a risk, why not take a risk on a product that goes for $200 to $250 rather than one that goes for $2500 to infinity, right? If you are remotely technical, then you won't have any trouble with CQC. If you have some programming skills (in the Java/C++/C# type family) you can really make it hum by using the built in CML language to create very powerful macros.
Anyway, it is definitely the case that more and more functionality will be moving onto the PC, and CQC is at the forefront of this trend, integrating a powerful front end, IR control, X-10 control, serial, socket and USB device control, extensive back end for the traditional automation features, application control, user based security, full network distributed architecture, and so forth.
As to the Windows stability jokes, that's a common concern, but it all depends on what you want to do. If you are really concerned with stability, but put a bootable Windows image with CQC image on a CD and boot from that, into a box with ECC memory and a small RAID drive system. That would be every bit as stable as any CE device.
Most ATMs out there run a stripped down version of some general purpose OS booting from a fixed image, and a number of devices in the home theater world are really just closed general purpose PC architectures booting a fixed image. Where the instability comes from in most systems is from the constant installation of applications and viruses and and questionable drivers and the like, by naive users. A PC in the closet that is serving as the control system shouldn't be exposed to any of that kind of abuse and should remain very stable.
But, the great thing about software based systems is that, if you aren't particularly concerned about it, you don't have to do any of this or spend anything for robustness you don't need. If you are just controlling your home theater from your HTPC, is it really going to end your life if you kill the PC with a virus by surfing porn on the big screen late one night? Not that any of us would do that of course. For most folks they would just have Ghost'ed the drives, so they just put it back and pick up again, and take the consequences of how they chose to use it. But you have the choice with a PC based system. If you are using it for full home control, you can create a very stable system and put in the closet and it will be totally stable. CQC's networked architcture means you can manage the central CQC coponents on that closeted central PC from anywhere on the network.
One interesting possibility these days is a very small form factor PC, of which there are lots these days. Put a very small drive in it, use the on-board video, if is has a PCI slot put a 2, 4, or 8 port multi-port serial card in it (or use an outboard one on a USB port), they have USB and firewire and ethernet ports built in generally. Combine that with either a CD boot image or a flash card image, and that's a very intersting little 'automation appliance'. Once I get enough revenues to start exploring this, I will be looking into providing such an appliance for customers who don't wan to roll their own.
Buy a mid-sized or desktop sized touch screen LCD and sit it beside the couch, and add CQC, and you have a control and automation appliance that can do everything that the big boys can do, for probably half the price of just the base Crestron CPU (which cannot run any of your other software and which still requires a very expensive, proprietary Crestron touch screen.)
