I was reading over the paper about how Windows Vista cripples PCs by increasing system resources, delivering reducing quality video, blocking hardware that doesn’t support DRM and so forth. I’ve never been particularly angry at Microsoft, they are a big evil corporation, that is their job but this is so far beyond that, this is just a joke.
The bottom line is, though: who is going to save us? Where are the nice corporations? I mean, we can all switch to Linux and that would be all good but what distro comes with support for playing DRM’ed DVDs. None that are not in a shady legal position and this is just going to get worse when the Vista problems take hold. The problem is that Linux doesn’t have the corporations to mount any kind of resistance against this. They are all random groups of developers occasionally formed into companies like Redhat and Canonical which are simply drops in the ocean on a worldwide scale.
Apple perhaps? The issue there is they are even worse than Microsoft. Take a look at something like the iTunes copy protection (http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191000408&pgno=3&queryText=). Microsoft forced other people out of the market using various tactics that could be considered underhand but at the end of the day it was market forces – people could choose to go elsewhere, it would just put them at a disadvantage. Apple is just locking people in with iTunes, only they can play it and iPod’s don’t support any other DRM.
I sit here thinking, when I’m the guy at the head of the massive corporation making these decisions, things are going to be different. Of course, right now I have a lot of dreams and only a pittance of success. Did Mr. Gates sit on his bed in his Harvard dorm room and think when he made it, he would get rid of all this crap? How about Mr. Jobs? Howard Stringer or Nobuyuki Idei perhaps (CEO and ex-CEO of Sony, switching over around the notable time that Sony’s optical drive crippling malware was discovered)?
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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.