I have a friend that worked on the MCE project. He now works at google, like many other intelligent former microsoft employees. When MCE was being built, the decision was made to use windows xp as the OS for MCE, instead of creating a new OS for the project, as Microsoft did for the xbox. Because of this decision he, and others from that team consider MCE as a failure in it's current state, due to instability. If the developers feel this way about the project, why would you trust it to take care of your clients' automation?

Crestron and AMX or SOLID control systems that interface with every system they possibly can find a way to work with. That includes MCE.

That is not the same as a company that builds their control systems on an instable operating system, like MCE.

This is nothing new. How many successful control systems do you know of that are base their SYSTEM CONTROLLERS on Windows XP? Many have already tried. Crestron and AMX don't consider any of them as competition. This isn't going to improve just because vista is here, or because a company like Lifeware has a huge marketing budget.