When I bought the Boxee Box, it was because I had sampled the software for free on a regular PC first. Yes, you could actually download the software, see that it met your needs, and then buy it, prepacked as a dedicated device, an appliance.
It was genius marketing and it had me throwing out my old setup instantly. Everything just worked. The remote was unmatched. Simple on one side. Qwerty on the other side, for apps, searches, etc.
The box itself played all kinds of file-formats & sources without a hitch. It extracted, identified and unified meta-data much better than any other software I have seen, and auto-combined it into a huge database, all without having performance degraded, like much software does when the library goes big.
Everything was great. They even shipped updates, and with a simple checkbox, you could join the beta-channel to get early releases.
And you did get releases often enough to feel that you were using a living product. It was great.
But then, suddenly they seemed to shift focus. You could no longer download and sample the software. You had to buy the box, unsampled. Then they shifted focus away from the one thing it did great (play your media, from your storage and network devices) to the one everyone fails at: Creating a "unified livingroom media experience".
Big surprise: They failed at it.
They wanted me to sign up for an account, have it integrate with everything social, pull all my friends embarassing youtube likes and linked facebook content, in my face, everytime I turned the device on.
And then they stopped updating the apps and app-repos. That Youtube app which was kinda shit, but sorta worked? Yeah, no longer working after Youtube introduced couch-mode. And they're not fixing it either.
There also seems to be some performance problems arising. But nobody has been pushing any updates to fix that. So you need to reboot the device every now and then.
They went from being what everyone wished XBMC could be, to something completely without focus. They took and sacrificed the one thing they did well trying to be "everything to everyone".
They took something which worked well and let it rot, super-busy failing at something else.
I hope Samsung buying these guys means they will be going back to doing what they used to do well. Because I need a new media-box soon and I still haven't found anything which looks like a worthwhile replacement for my old Boxee box.