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Office Depot: Windows XP Apps Must Be Microsoft-Approved
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at The Inquirer, by May 30th Office Depot will only be carrying computer products that have been certified by Microsoft and carry the 'Designed for Windows XP' logo. This may be an initial glimpse at how Microsoft could introduce Digital Restrictions Management by ensuring all retail hardware and software products are approved by Redmond."
But, this is simply a marketing decision. Most of the "lesser" applications, the ones without certification, usually aren't hot sellers at the depot.
Did you Vote for Linux?
Microsoft may be a monopoly, but Office Depot is hardly the only place to buy software.
Software will still be available online, and from other vendors. As long as Microsoft doesn't require software makers to register with MS in order to make their products function properly on the OS, it can't be as bad as the article makes it out to be.
Microsoft's attack on 3rd party developers over the years have made it pretty obvious, but I guess some people still haven't got the message: this is an invite-only party.
After all, according to a friend who works at Staples, for every one copy of Office or serious stuff they sell they sell 3 games and about 20 pieces of $10 old shovelware. Assuming the same is true at Office Depot, what are the odds that the shovelware is going to be, or bother to get, certified?
People are not going to start buying $60 games from you just because you stop selling the $10 games, they'll go to someone else selling the $10 crap.
Sweet crap people. Its called a "Business Alliance" and it happens an aweful lot, and not just in the IT industry.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
If others start following suit (read Walmart, Best Buy, etc) then this could be a very big deal indeed. Esp. if these retailers extend this thinking to their online sales. Think of it this way, Microsoft could effectively control the release dates of it's competitors products (or at least retail release dates) by controlling exactly when they are granted "certificiation". They also have the advantage of ALWAYS having at least a bit of a heads up on any products that their competitors are about to release (no springing a new Office suite on'em). Once again, having the OS company also sells apps is just a bad idea. How long before the OS will refuse to run any apps that have not been "blessed" by Redmond themselves?
I disagree. Do NOT get the ones where you can disable it. Get the ones that do not include it at all.
If it was an Office Depot decision, it would be OK. If it was a decision made under pressure from Microsoft, it's not OK. Because monopolies have unprecedented power, they are subject to additional restrictions.
"This may be an initial glimpse at how Microsoft could introduce Digital Restrictions Management by ensuring all retail hardware and software products are approved by Redmond."
It could also be an initial glimpse at how I could suddenly switch to linux, if windows gets too restrictive..
Have you sent "installed linux today" -email to microsoft yet?
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Well, I peruse my Sunday ads every week, looking for bargains on things I can use....I've gotten some good stuff at Office Depot, mostly hardware or CDR's there...I go where the best deal is...I've already gone to their site and emailed a letter expressing my concern about this policy. Are you going to wait till your 'favorite' store does the same thing?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Actually according to the headline, "Windows XP Apps Must Be Microsoft-Approved"
I don't think Office Depot considers Red Hat or OO to be Windows XP apps.
0xfeedface
Remember the EULA on windows from two years back? It said "This product cannot be used in life-critical applications, because it contains Java from Sun Microsystems." Don't underestimate the damage a sinister sounding warning message can cause.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Perhaps it might, particularly if the trend moves to other retailers. Office Depot isn't the first place I think of to get software, but apparently some people do buy there, and as a low profile seller they might have been a good place to start this practice, then when it shows up at the major retailers it can be dismissed as "nothing new".
But in asking if it will not just increase piracy, you should also ask who is behind this, who would be hurt by piracy and who would indirectly benefit. While OfficeMax didn't outright say so, I would bet that there was pressure from Microsoft to put this policy in place. So what software might this cause an increase in piracy of? Software not officially blessed and approved by Microsoft. Might this not be a small side benefit that Microsoft actually would welcome, putting another nail in the coffin in the little guy that will not play by Bill's rules? Clearly all Microsoft products will have the logos (even if, as is many times the case, they don't meet the same standards that independent developers are required to have to get that logo!) so this will not increase their piracy, only that of the competition.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Mod me down for saying this (on a side note : I think its lame to say "mod me down" : but if I don't say it, people will think I'm trolling. By putting that tag on my message I'm admitting the message is inflammatory)
Anyway, there are some notable advantages to a system like Palladium. Theoretically, it could enable certain types of applications that aren't possible today which involve trusting the client. Yes, I'm aware that even if the hardware is integrated into the processor someone could still steal the private keys the system depends on, and create an emulated version, cracking the system wide open. I'm also pretty confident the initial versions will have some subtle but still gaping hole, allowing them to be cracked with ease.
However, in theory if it all works right (and from a theoretical standpoint it IS possible to make it work right and be unbreakable) applications running under its protection would have their memory space protected against intrusion.
There is NOTHING, I repeat, NOTHING planned that would stop you from writing your own applications that hide under this umbrella (but an integral part will be the system kernel, so microsoft OS only), and I'm sure microsoft will encourage you to do so. There is nothing that will stop you from running untrusted code : it just won't have access to resources belonging to trusted applications (unless you've hacked it of course)
Palladium won't prevent you from installing a different OS on the system, you just won't be able to run trusted apps in that OS (technically its possible to give these same features with open source. The actual keys would have to be hidden, controlled by someone, but everything else could be viewed and contributed to) . Yes in theory SOME types of remote hacking exploits could be stopped. Network applications would now only process messages that are signed by code that your palladium chip certifies as meeting certain criteria. This could make it possible for a microsoft server app to only even look at messages sent by a microsoft client app, preventing many hacks.
This means the application could have secret information in it that needs to be hidden from the end user. For instance, the application could be a movie player that decrypts a spiffy new high definition format which is capable of encoding 1080p digital movie quality video, copied byte for byte straight from the version used in theaters. It could be an online gaming client that to run efficiently must have certain information protected from access and tampering(coordinates of other players, your crosshair location, the current state of the world physics system, objects occluded from view, and many many more). The current generation of MMORPGs have very limited interactivity (cannot aim, shitty AI, no physics, no elements that require player twitch skill) because the client cannot be trusted with anything (and even then it has to have SOME information that could be useful to a hacker) nor control anything interesting.
And yes, it could be a document viewer that reads encrypted documents. The document files themselves might contain more information than the author wants revealed, so the viewer would obey certain rules about when the file can be accessed, and what machine. Currently this is impossible to create because someone could steal the decryption key the viewer uses right out of memory, or edit its code such that it no longer obeys restrictive tags in the file.
None of this would stop you from using untrusted players to view your current data files, and nothing would force you to convert. Unfortunatly, since the keys to the kingdom will be controlled by microsoft bad things could come from this. They could charge monopoly prices, use it to squeeze out their competitors, and do many more things. However, I believe that this has the potential to be a killer app. If you don't want microsoft to rule the software world even more than it already does, perhaps the open source community should look to creating their own, equivalent, alternative.
From the article: "Please be aware that Office Depot is immediately requiring all products that connect to a Personal Computer and Notebook Computer must pass these Designed for Windows XP logo requirements to be considered for retail distribution through our stores" - note the italics are mine. We are not talking about software but hardware that must be XP certified. So don't worry about that game, worry about that Video card or printer etc!!!!
Really, write a clear and concise reason why you don't like there decision.
You could be surprised at how seriously corporation take these letters. Hell, I got Saturn* to drop the price of a car when a I wrote them a letter at how angry I was at the way a sales rep. treated me.
*Saturn is a car company that has a non-negotiable car price.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Most small businesses do their shopping at Office Depot or a comparable office store. The "who the hell cares, no one buys computer related items anywhere but Fry's/newegg/CompUSA/random local specialty shop anyway" posts are naive and uninformed. A lot of non-technical people buy their equipment at office stores, not least because many of them have corporate accounts there. The implication here, while not stated explicitly, is that there will be no non-windows software at all. Back in 99/00 I convinced several clients to put linux on their servers largely on the basis of it being sold at Office Depot. This is an important marketing presence for linux. Not critical, but important.
Moreover, having a fairly major outlet only carry XP certified hardware will possibly encourage manufacturers to cut back on support for non-XP operating systems across their product lines. This will not only affect Mac/BSD/Linux users, but users of Windows 2000, NT, 98, and ME (yes, both of them).
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I just bought a notebook, and although I searched I was not able to buy one with the features I wanted in the price range without paying the extra Microsoft XP tax. Don't tell me it's a free market when a company found guilty of these monopolistic practices in federal court can continue to do business as usual.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Two, if you can't get your stuff on the shelves without MS certifying your drivers, and MS is a bit...slow about certifying devices with vendor-supplied Linux drivers.... Guess how many companies will look at the 98% of the peripheral/card market that is Windows and the 2% that is not, and decide they don't need to distribute their own Linux drivers, after all? We'd be back to 1995 for Linux drivers, rolling our own from reverse engineering.
Three, to really implement DRM for video and audio, you need to build it into the video and audio cards, and MS is still pushing their own DRM standards. If they can turn XP certification into a club to beat the card-builders over the head with, how long before you can't buy a SoundBlaster that isn't hard-wired for MicroSoft DRM?
Maybe that's all so much conspiracy-spinning, but the implications and conclusions look pretty obvious to me.
--Dave
This means that all of their existing products that do not meet the XP logo requirements will be found at a discount in the clearance bins....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They don't even need to slap up the driver. 99% of USB devices work with a Mac out of the box, OS X has built-in generic drivers.
"A SCHEME BEING IMPLEMENTED by Office Depot - almost certainly at Microsoft's behest"
"Almost certainly" means that they're not sure. The article really pushes my anger buttons and I don't like it. Before the INQUIRERER pushes my rage button I would like to be sure that they know what it is that they are talking about so that I don't go off and make an ass out of my self.
This may be a dark plot by Microsoft, it wouldn't be the first time but it also could be a decision made completely by Office Depot. Please don't push my buttons if you're not sure.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
You *have* to look at the system requirement anyway, and you don't need to be "certified" to say that your software runs on Windows.
For that matter, who makes major software purchases at Office Depot anyway? Getting the best price is so much easier online, and unless you woke up and suddenly decided that your office had to use the next version or you were all going to die, the wait for delivery is no problem. I mean, it's one thing when a monitor goes out and you have to have it right now, but I can't conceive of any situation where you would suddenly have to go to OD and buy a shrink-wrapped title.
At any rate, I wager that this is no harm to OD because most of the software they sell is probably "big name brand" stuff. Smaller vendors that don't cert will just keep selling online and through other outlets.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The Inquirer piece abruptly concludes with an alleged Office Depot memo to suppliers. The Inquirer neither explains the circumstance by which they came into possession of this alleged memo nor does it even bother to asert that the "journalist" whose name bylines the story made an attempt to contact Office Depot to verify it's veracity and authenticity.
So much for journalistic credibility. Slashdot has neither the interest or the ethics to verify facts (hiding behind their "we just post other peoples' stuff" alibi), but I guess we can now add another source to the list of online rubbish vendors.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm glad someone is taking a stand for lazy coding. I wish every application had its own unique look and feel. I love spending half an hour trying to figure out where all the menus are, or where the exit option is. I can't wait until uninstallers are spread throughout the system so I can spend 10 minutes trying to get rid of a piece of software. I wish that all help documents were either 8 billion line plain text files or embedded in a custom help browser.
And I am so glad that most programs are installed in subfolders named after the fucking publisher, because the first thing that jumps in my head when I think of Nero is "Ahead", and Neverwinter Nights always makes me think "Bioware".
I don't see why everyone's so up in arms about this. Windows is a proprietary platform, and should by all means take advantage of one of the strongest advantages of its nature: centralized quality control.
Say what you will about Microsoft OSes; they've become stable enough that most crashes IO see are the fault of either hardware, drivers or third-party applications. Having a seal of approval makes a lot of sense in the consumer market: it increases accountability for the platform vendor and tends to raise software quality overall--at least when properly implemented. All game console manufacturers have been doing it since forever, and it's had very few side-effects.
As long as development tools are available to anyone and the testing process is inexpensive and fair, I don't see any problems with this, and I certainly can't draw a straight line from software quality control to tighter DRM, as many of the more paranoid among us seem to be eager to do.
Red Hat maybe not, but OpenOffice.org sure runs on Windows too. (Or maybe my NWN design work was so coffee-powered that I thought I had installed it in Win98SE and wrote pages of stuff, when I in fact had done that in Linux instead... =)