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Re: Vista -- Rebellion Against the Customer

Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Feeding Frenzy: Digital Rights Management is really just an ecosystem for
> selling our own stuff to us again and again.
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | And into this confluence of greed and shared interest strides
> | Microsoft and Bill Gates promising a technical solution that
> | gives every potential partner exactly what they want.

Haven't we heard this before?
Remember their promise of DVD?
Remember how Windows ME was supposed to give us Video editing and
protect against piracy at the same time?

Remember how the SPA, BSA, and SBA were supposed to collect billions
for the small software publishers whose stuff was getting ripped off as
unregistered shareware, but in practice, the lion's share of the
settlements ended up in Microsoft's account?

How about those great copy protection schemes for MS-DOS applications,
including the one for Word that trashed a few hundred Mac SE machines
because SCSI kept repairing the bad sectors Microsoft kept trying to
create?  Microsoft decided that word had been pirated, and proceeded to
"trash the disk".  Fortunately, it was announced immediately, and
Microsoft removed the "trasher", but those whose machines were damaged,
couldn't even sue for for the damage caused by malicious code - because
they had accepted the risk in accepting the Microsoft EULA.

Microsoft's only success in protecting intellectual property seems to
be in protecting itself from 3rd party competitiors.  They are really
good at that.  They can lock-out, sabotage, or even damage the hardware
and/or software of end users who attempt to use competitior products
instead of theirs, and when all else fails, they can disable the
software.  It worked GREAT for XP didn't it.  Except that End Users got
so annoyed that they began exploring alternatives to Microsoft, such as
FireFox, Java, OpenOffice, and Linux.

> | Content
> | owners get a chance to sell everything over again and this time
> | they'll be supposedly protected from piracy.

Yes, protected - like Netscape, Brief, Stacker, WordPerfect, Lotus
1-2-3, Corel Draw, Visio, RealMedia, Itunes, Ipods, Macs, OS/2,
ButtonWare, Borland, and all of those other great companies and
products who were "protected" by Microsoft.

Sign up for that kind of protection, and Microsoft will have a monopoly
on all recorded media.
We'll be able to add Capital Records, Virgin, Universal Studios,
Time-Life, McGraw-Hill, Gannett, and maybe even Fox to the "protected"
list above.

I guess it's a bit like the nice little insurance agents in New York
City who come around wearing leather jackets and offer to sell
insurance or protection against "accidents" like the one the guy down
the block had.  The one who kept telling the other merchains not to pay
for this "insurance" or "protection".

That nice "protected" list is just the big names, the ones everybody
knew.  We don't hear about the other few thousand businesses who paid
the protection money, signed away their intellectual property rights,
and became "consulting firms", because Microsoft "protected" them.

> | Everyone will have
> | to buy a new TV with an HDMI connector as well as all new video
> | and stereo components of every type, just so long as they, too,
> | use strictly HDMI connections.

This might be a problem for countries who regulate common carrier
communications.  As it is now, Microsoft has been tunnelling encrypted
garbage within envelopes which have lead to nearly $60 billion in
direct damages and nearly $600 million in indirect damages - due to the
lack of documented standards that let regulators know what is supposed
to be "safe" and what might be "malware" being pushed to millions of
PCs in a matter of hours.  Now homeland security is getting worried
because they realize that a really nasty and malicious virus could be
force-fed into millions of US computers and cripple the entire
information infrastructure, and possibly the financial markets, in less
than an hour.

Now Microsoft wants the FCC to turn a blind eye to their "innovative"
new standards, and allow Microsoft to force-feed a new proprietary
standard which supercedes the standard which was the direct result of
very careful and lengthy negotiations that took almost 10 years to
complete?

Well, I guess, if Microsoft is willing to contribute $2-3 billion to
various "charities" which can then use those funds to promote "right"
thinking and "right" voting, in support of the "right" wing, then the
FCC chairman should be fired, and the new chairman should let Microsoft
send anything they want into millions of homes.

If Sony, Panisonic, Matchushita, Phillips, Magnavox, RCA, LG, and all
of those other nice companies who manufacture TVs don't like it, too
bad.  If CableVision, and all of the other cable providers end up
losing their franchises because they introduced this new protocol
without getting the permission of each and every municipality, that's
their problem.

> | Problems of deliberate signal
> | degradation and driver horrors will make all video cards and
> | most processors obsolete, so we'll have to buy all new PCs.

Yes, but we'll also have to buy new televisions, new cable boxes, new
video recording units, new video playback units, and new display
devices - because none of the old stuff works anymore.  That should go
over real well with millions of people who just forked over more than
$1000 each for HDTV displays with digital tuners.

> | Mr.
> | Gutmann characterizes this lack of backward compatibility or any
> | shred of technical elegance as suicidal on Microsoft's part

If any other company in the world attempted to do this, it would be
suicidal.
Remember, IBM tried it in 1991, and their stock crashed, their revenues
collapsed, and they had to restructure the entire company.  Huge
numbers of people had to be laid off, others were offered early
retirement, whether they wanted to or not, and others were simply
reassigned to consulting jobs.

IBM learned the hard way,that there is no substitute for Listening to
the Customer, and giving them what they want.

Microsoft is still in the "If we build it, they will buy" mentality.
After all, many predicted that Windows XP would be a flop, but they
didn't expect Microsoft to give an "all or nothing" ultimatum with a 30
day decision period.  Enough fish jumped into the boat to give
Microsoft monopoly control of the PC market for another 6 years.

One Trademark that Microsoft won't be able to display during the Vista
unveiling, will be IBM.  There might be a Lennovo trademark, that's as
close as they will get.

> | when, in fact, it is Microsoft's best imitation of brilliance.

Imitation of brilliance is right.

> | Intel and AMD love it.
The same way they loved it when Windows NT 3.1 came out and killed the
PC market for almost 3 more years?

The same way they loved it when Microsoft held back the release of a 64
bit operating system until the DOJ settlement was complete, even as
Linux "white box" vendors were dominating the 64 bit chip market,
eventually capturing nearly 30% of the total market.

Meanwhile commodity features and bottlenecks in XP killed the demand
for Celeron and Pentium 4 chips, and Intel nearly got killed in a price
war with AMD, then suffered even more as AMD's Athalon-64 created a
demand for a "Linux/Windows" hybrid with 64 bit Linux and 32 bit
Windows running in the same machine at the same time, while Intel's
Itanium languished in the wasteland of the server market, hoping to
snag some market share as a Linux server engine.

> | ATI and nVidia love it.

The same way they loved it when Microsoft decided that OpenGL cards
were bad and that all of that inventory was now worthless and they
would now have to ship DirectX video cards - which would end up
becoming huge money losers for the PC makers?

> | Thomson and Philips and Sony
> | and Matsushita and Samsung and LG love it.

Yes, I'm sure that they just loved spending $billions trying to conform
to the standards established by the FCC, only to find out that all of
this was for naught because Microsoft has decided to impose their
"standard du jur" which is not publicly documented.

> | Every movie studio, TV
> | network, and record company loves it.

Yeah, I'm sure they love having to pay Microsoft 25% of their profits
from a market they could have entered years ago if Microsoft hadn't
been holding them at bay with their ability to impose a new standard
every week.  Is it AVI?  MPEG2? MPEG4? WMA? No wait, it's a new
standard.  Oh,and of course, we have to pay Microsoft a percentage of
the royalties for permission to use their proprietary protocol, and
force our viewers to pay a percentage for royalties for permission to
use the viewer, and of course, we have to use Microsoft's proprietary
network for the content.

Meanwhile, YouTube is letting people download industry standard format
content, play it on their industry standard viewer, and nobody has to
pay special royalties - Google gets their money from the advertizing
royalties - including the ads that people actually download because
they requested it.

YouTube/Google make it possible for someone who WANTS to look at their
ad content to watch a series of guided videos which could last an hour
or two based on interests, compared to the 30 second spot that is
force-fed to an uninterested viewer who is more annoyed by the delay in
getting to see the video he just paid $2 to view, than inspired by the
30 second ad for a truck he can't afford and wouldn't buy if he could,
before he watches his favorite rap star in a video.

> | The only people who don't
> | love it are consumers, and neither industry nor government really
> | cared much about them, ever.

IBM made that mistake, about 16 years ago.  Remember?  They told nearly
50 million people who had just purchased computers over the last 2
years - that those computer were worthless, because they didn't have a
Microchannel bus, and therefore would not be able run OS/2.  The
end-users were pissed, many customers even tried to demand refunds for
their "obsolete" machines (and didn't get them).

It created the opportunity for Microsoft to "steal" the market from IBM
with Windows.  The reality is that IBM practically GAVE the market to
Microsoft.  Retaliation is an ugly thing.  When you tell 50 million
custotmers they are stupid suckers, they retailiate.  When you piss off
1 million hackers by stealing their software - they retaliate.  When
you piss off corporate customers and government procurement people,
they retailate.  It might happen in weeks, or years, or even decades,
but it's only a matter of time.

When the Railroads would bring in homesteader farmers to clear the
land, plant the crops, and then, as soon as they had clear title to
their land, burned them out.  The farmers retailiated.  The most famous
were men like Jesse James, who often burned the mortgages to give the
farmers the upper hand.  The farmers in turn, often mislead the posse
teams who were in persuit.  In some cases, they would even run horses
to cover the tracks.

When the great depression hit, and the banks and trusts tried to walk
off with people's money, Dillinger became a celebrity and a hero to
many, who saw his antics as a way of getting back at the bankers who
had run off with their personal savings and then forclosed their
mortgages.

Microsoft has already begun to see the retaliation.  In some countries,
Linux and/or Open Source applications must be used unless there is a
compelling reason to require Windows and propriatery software.  Making
the case for a compelling reason can be nearly impossible to do.  It's
not enough to say "well, we have been using Word, and all our documents
are in Word, therefore we need Word".  These agencies are looking
beyond the quarter.  They are looking at the long term, and they often
make it very clear that the Word documents must be converted to ODF
documents, so that Windows and Word are no longer needed.

Even in this group, the last bastion for WinTrolls has become the
superior game technology of Windows.  Windows is better for playing
video games?  Imagine going to Prudential Insurance and telling them
that you need to spend $400 million to upgrade/replace 100,000
workstations with Vista machines, so that you can play World of
Warcraft II!  And of course, imagine that your are new asked by the CIO
to make this presentation to the CEO, CFO, COO, and divisional
directors.  And then explain to them how they can raise the $400
million by laying off 20,000 people, possibly insurance agents,
adjusters, actuaries, and brokers.  They might also be able to reduce
this head count by not paying bonuses or giving raises - even though
this was going to be a very good year for bonuses and they have been
promising bonuses for the years that they spent bonuses to pay for
previous Microsoft related upgrades.

When the board decides that maybe they should start the cuts with the
IT deparmentment, and start with the 300 box-booters who are rebooting
Windows servers, followed by you, you can try to explain why these
Windows machines can't run without all these box-booters.

> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20061229_001403.html
>
> Buy, buy, buy. Waste, waste, waste. Let the world just drown.

Keep in mind that Windows XP introduced the concept of the "Disposable
Computer" because price wars had some completely eroded the price of
the PCs (to the point where OEMs were losing money on each machine),
that it cost less to replace a corrupted machine with another machine
than it did to back-up, re-image, and restore, the corrupted machine.

The corrupted machines did make nice Linux machines.  No great 3D
graphics of course, but who needs 3D animation on a WORK-station?
Where can we put these new Linux boxen?  Call centers?  Points of
Service? Kiosks?  How come these Linux boxes don't need to be reimaged
every 3-6 months?

Well, Microsoft has promised that Vista won't give way to viruses and
won't swallow Malware whole anymore.  And to prove it they invited 100
hackers to try and "break in".  It took them almost 4 hours to hack in.
 Of course, by the end of the day, the press was gone.  Appearantly,
Vista was just about as vulnerable as XP.

The Microsoft spokesperson said "Well, if we had turned on full
control, we would have repelled them" - the machine would have been
completely disfunctional, but it wouldn't have swallowed malware.

> Gates and co. are busy making money.
Yes.  They are making 85% profit margins while their OEM customers
scrape to make 10% and several OEMs report double-digit losses for
several quarters in a rew.  Microsoft makes 85% profit while their
customers make less than 10%, because nearly half their profits (or the
equivalent) are going to Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, E-Trade, and others, are consistently
turning out double-digit profits while running Linux.

There are a lot of companies who want to be "The Next Google", but they
won't do it running Microsoft.


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