Knarly: Why is Microsoft Media Player so crap?

I'm in the US. My parents send me some TV shows from Europe which they burned from their Tivo clone.

My question is, how come the free linux player ( gxine ) will play this no problems, and my wifes Mac will play it no problem, but Microsoft Media player on XP won't?

I mean, can't Microsoft with their thousands of well paid developers achieve what a handful a people manage to do in their spare time for Linux?

Now I TRULY welcome someone to come along and say, "Yeah.. but if you do a bit of research, and install the right codecs it will work fine on Windows" and that would be BLISS.. Imagine, a discussion about Linux vs Windows, where it's the WINDOWS system that you can get to work if you know how to get under the hood!