You may not have noticed (we didn’t either) but Microsoft looks to quietly have killed off their once highly publicized Portable Media Center platform for portable media players. While there’s been no official word from Microsoft corporate on this, a post recently placed by what is believed to be a Microsoft employee confirms the PMC saga is indeed over.

This post, placed in the Microsoft discussion group microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter.portable, is in response to a question about licensing information for PMC software. The response, in summary, says Microsoft stopped licensing the Portable Media Center platform in 2006 after releasing a second version of it. The company apparently decided to “take what we have learned from our investments in Portable Media Center and focus our product and marketing resources on building media experiences on connected Windows Mobile powered devices.”

It was added that “we do not plan any future Portable Media Center software upgrades or marketing activities.” It’s interesting to speculate why Microsoft killed off this platform. Did they do it because of the ability of iPods to play video? Was it because they wanted to concentrate resources on the Zune? Did Microsoft see new Windows Mobile-powered devices more as the wave of the future?

Perhaps a little of all…whatever the case, the Portable Media Center experience now officially goes the way of other discarded Microsoft experiments such as Microsoft Bob. 

[via SlashGear]