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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.
If they truly enforce this, then MS will lose market share the way Apple did when they stopped being the flexible environment for users. Fortunately for Apple, they have come back around. What OS will take the position? LINUX of course...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
How many people here can say they do their software shopping at Office Depot? Anyone? Bueler?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Red Hat 9.0 anyone?
OpenOffice anyone?
I think Redmond is playing the card of trying to keep non-MS approved (i.e. open source and other ISV) software off of retail shelves. However, with retail giants like Wal-Mart only concerned with cost and sales, this could prove a losing strategy....especially outside of the U.S.
My two cents.
I detect a small conflict brewing between the last two stories...
Ofice Depot will only sell Designed for Windows XP products, yet the redhat.com page says RedHat Linux 9.0 will be available from.....(you guessed it!) Office Depot!
Well, this IS a turn-up for the books - who thought RH would manage to get a "Designed for Windows XP" certification!
David
I only use Windows when I have to, to be sure, so maybe I'm out of touch. But I sure didn't think the penetration of XP was that large, yet--is Office Depot really ready to sacrfice 75% of their customers?
I guess just because it's ready for XP doesn't mean that it won't work on older versions of winders. On the other hand, I see lots of users of win98 knowing what it feels like to use a Mac and go shopping for software in an office supply store...
Hint--they won't be paying $199 just to shop with you.
--
$tar -xvf
Please be aware that Office Depot is immediately requiring all products that connect to a Personal Computer and Notebook Computer must pass these Designed for Windows XP logo requirements
The specific use of the word "connect" smells strongly like the new policy applies only to hardware products, so that customers aren't scared when they bring home their products and get the "unsigned driver" alert. (Under Windows 2000 and Windows XP, installing an unsigned driver produces such an alert. Installing an unsigned user-mode application program does not produce such an alert.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sweet crap people. Its called a "Business Alliance" and it happens an aweful lot, and not just in the IT industry.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I don't have an Office Depot near me, so I don't know what they're selling right now. I do know that if you walk into Staples, Circuit City, or Best Buy, they have a TON of crap that "connects" to computers. They will NEVER follow Office Depot's example, they would lose a SHITLOAD of business. Do you really think that they'll pull every keyboard, joystick, printer, stick of RAM, etc that isn't XP certified? What about multimedia speaker systems? Are Alienware cases supposed to get XP certification?
Another good example is Radio Shack. Shit, are they supposed to get every FAN and HEATSINK and power supply Y-cable M$ certified for XP? Right... Office Depot is going to be the loser here. Nobody else is going to go along with this steaming pile of crap.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
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?
Note that the initial article came from a British paper, indeed a very good one which I, like many on the left side of the puddle, read regularly. The article refers to Office Depot's UK stores, which have adopted the policy. It also suggests that US stores haven't yet done so, though they might at some point in the future.
I don't know how autonomous the different Office Depot divisions are, but many companies give a lot of autonomy to national divisions.
I sit two doors away from a Staples so I don't really go into an Office Depot much anyway....
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
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.
This has been going on isnce the pre win 3.1 days
Windows crashing with a mysterious error message when run under Dr. Dos instead of MS DOC. MS eventually lost the lawsuit in that one. Turned out they had designed Windows to detect the DOS vendor and crash if a non MS Dos was found.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I'm actually posting this message from a Computer located inside of an Office Depot location. I have been working at the depot for 4 years now, and I personally consider this to be a good thing, although I do have some reservations.
Consider the current retail culture in this world, sales are down, margins are slim and overall, profits are down. Office Depot is in a position where something has to be done to distinguish themselves from our competitors. Staples, Office Max and Grand & Toy (in canada) as well as whatever other retailers in the states are out there, make for a very competitive selling atmosphere, and with margins being as slim as they are, you cannot compete on price, what you have left is customer service, selection, and reliability. Most of the items that are going to be affected by this are the cheap little invoicing programs that no one buys anyway, that all get returned to the vendor after a year of not being on the shelf. Also consider that your typical customer at the depot, is not as computer savvy as you, or I am. Our typical customer is the home user, who is upgrading their early pentium box, and places constant phone calls to the store, whenever "This Driver is not digitally signed" comes up, or even today, the lady that called to ask how to find the CD Key for her Black ICE Defender. These are the type of people who NEED everything to work as smoothly out of the box as possible, with few or no questions.
Just because all of the itmes that we will now carry must be supported my XP, does not mean that those items will not work in alternate OS's...it just means that if an item is not 100% XP compliant, we won't carry it. If anything, this is just going to be an incentive for companies like HP, Canon, Lexmark, Epson etc to get off of their asses and fix all of the broken drivers that we see daily.
Disclaimer. I'm personally an avid OSS user, including Debian and FreeBSD. My home network has been windows free for 3 years now, and I could not be happier. However, I realize that 99% of the people that I see on a daily basis at my store, are using XP, or are upgrading to XP in the near future. From the standpoint of my employer, this makes sense, and I agree with them.
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
A "Not designed for Windows XP" logo?
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
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. This change is being implemented due to our on-going pursuite to enhance and simplify our fanatical customer service environment at Office Depot. Products must be certified as Designed for Windows XP by May 30, 2003.
Please note that this policy refers to HARDWARE, not software. Thus, serial modems, mice, keyboards, surge supressors, cables, etc. could all fall under this category.
Does anybody seriously expect anybody to go through the motions of getting its serial cables "certified" by The Beast? Surge supressors? USB cables? All these things plug into PCs and notebooks, right?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
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....
Here's a summary of the logo requirements, from Microsoft's Logo site:
List of Windows Fundamentals Requirements
1.1 Perform primary functionality and maintain stability
1.2 Any kernel-mode drivers that the application installs must pass verification testing on Windows XP
1.3 Any device or filter drivers included with the application must pass Windows HCT testing
1.4 Perform Windows version checking correctly
1.5 Support Fast User Switching and Remote Desktop
1.6 Support new visual styles
1.7 Support switching between tasks
Installation Requirements List
2.1 Do not attempt to replace files that are protected by Windows File Protection
2.2 Migrate from earlier versions of Windows
2.3 Do not overwrite non-proprietary files with older versions
2.4 Do not require a reboot inappropriately
2.5 Install to Program Files by default
2.6 Install any shared files that are not side-by-side to the correct locations
2.7 Support Add or Remove Programs properly
2.8 Support "All Users" installs
2.9 Support Autorun for CDs and DVDs
Data and Settings Requirements List
3.1 Default to the correct location for storing user-created data
3.2 Classify and store application data correctly
3.3 Deal gracefully with access-denied scenarios
3.4 Support running as a Limited User
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.
Logo requirements exist to ensure a quality user experience. NOT to force DRM onto the world through Office Depot. This is biased speculation on the part of the submitter, and timothy, objective as always, posted it on the front page.
I don't want to buy a CD burner that says it works on XP when it won't without having to jump through tons of hoops.
I'm having a problem with an MP3 Player at the moment that has a USB interface. If I move this USB interface to any other USB port other than the one I installed the MP3 Drivers on, the MP3 Player won't work. It's clearly a software issue and this product isn't cleared as 'official' XP hardware.
The Manufacturer's suggestion on how to resolve this issue is not 'wait for the next version of the drivers' but install the drivers on each individual USB port. I've got 7 ports and I'll be damned if I'm going to install the drivers 7 times.
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
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.
"Logo requirements exist to ensure a quality user experience."
That explains why Windows packagings themselve do not have the logo.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
"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!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've worked at Office Depot for about the last year and a half, in the Technology department. We sell a little of everything, including games and other software, and it is mostly (95%) oriented towards Windows. The only real Linux software that we carry in-store is RHx, and I'm quite sure we will continue to carry it. And for the mac stuff, well, as said previously, we only carry TurboTax and Quicken, and again, that will probably stay.
What this policy is affecting most is going to be the bargain software as well as the cheapo hardware. From the perspective I see from working there, it is most definately a wise move, since most of the time when a piece of software or hardware does not carry the logo, it is much more difficult to install/use, and is prone to return (Example: Lexmark... who here HASN'T had problems installing their shitty inkjets?). It is unreal how many people buy something, can't get it to work without tweaking something that they dont know how to change, and take it back, even if there is a big "DO NOT RETURN TO STORE" sticker on it. Most of these products get return to "DND", which is either returned to the vendor for repair or destroyed; but either way it costs the store money. I think the biggest company this will hurt is Lexmark, unless they can get their certification soon. The bargain software, in my opinion, is good riddance.
I hate sigs...
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".
It says nothing about application software.
Can we stop the "Will they sell Linux" stuff now.
I assume they got sick of people bringing back everything that threw up the "This is not signed" box.
Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows CD. Too my astonishment and distress he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned it on. I was upset because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold and it seemed to have become thicker and heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, in lines finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:
'I cannot read the fiery letters,' I said. 'No,' he said, 'but I can. The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:' From email, author unknownDreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
We may be seeing the early signs of Microsoft's stragegy to get people to switch to their new Palladium version of Windows. Think about how the Palladium version is going to be completely incompatible with existing Windows systems. Pre-Palladium software won't run at all. Documents will not be transferrable between the old and new systems. Users of the new OS will even have to buy new Palladium-equipped PCs.
On the surface this seems insane. There are 40 million people still running Win98, who have never seen fit to upgrade their OS, let alone buy new hardware. Microsoft must have a strategy for making the switch happen. Perhaps they intend to embargo customers who don't switch, controlling the supply of software and hardware. Forcing the diehards to shop at secondhand stores for things like hard drives and video cards might be the Big Lever they use to make the world go where they want it to.
How long do you want to bet it will be before non-Palladium hardware is outright illegal?