Alex was kind enough to send along a link to Bill Gate's keynote talk at a big consumer electronics trade show.
Done watching? Good. Uhhhh.... Microsoft just doesn't quite get it...
But, many consumers are even farther behind in their understanding of convergence - and in the end the that may mean that the masses of ignorant ludites will swallow whatever Microsoft feeds them.
Its not so much that Microsoft doesn't get the technology. After all, they do have enough highly educated engineers and uber-nerds on their payroll. Its that the corporate culture of Microsoft is defined by a model of controlling the 'platform'. They focus so much energy on doing just that that they completely ignore what early adopters are telling them. i.e. "We want to control our own media our own way."
Instead of listening to these consumers, Microsoft is making DRM - or digital rights management - their priority. If they control the DRM - they control the flow of media. If they control the platform - consumers are stuck depending on redmond for their digital content. Its a nice strategy for future revenue - but remember - we didn't ask for DRM and I think Microsoft gets enough of our money anyway.
On a different note:
One thought I had when they were introducing one feature (the ability to remotely set your microsoft media center pc to record anything): its only a matter of time until we read the headline:
"Internet worm sets everyone's PVR to record porn"
We are talking about Microsoft security here - and a whole whack of people that have a lot of time on their hands to write such a bug.
But, my girlfriend quickly made another prediction that was much more evil than that - PVR SPAM - unscrupulous marketing folk hacking systems and setting a PVR to record infomercials - ingenious because there would be plausible deniability on the spammer's part. "We didn't do it - this is a work of an evil H4X0R"
andre
Posted by andre at January 18, 2005 09:41 PM