According to Peter Gutmann’s resourceful and very well written, “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection” Vista’s fallout is about to lock up a once open computing platform.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
“In July 2006, Cory Doctorow published an analysis of the anti-competitive nature of Apple’s iTunes copy-restriction system which looked at the benefits of restrictive DRM for the company that controls the DRM. The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution channel. In the same way that Apple has managed to acquire a monopolistic lock-in on their music distribution channel (an example being the Motorola ROKR fiasco, which was so crippled by restrictions that a Fortune magazine senior editor reviewed it as the STNKER), so Microsoft will totally control the premium-content distribution channel.”
goodbye PC…
