Let nobody underestimate how big this is. This is, in a roundabout way, just the fight Hollywood wants.
I am not a lawyer, so I could be wrong, but the way I see it, this will determine whether it is legal to manipulate digital content received from a subscription service. The content companies want to prove that when you sign up to receive television signals, you can only use those signals the way they want you to -- through their services, with their approved equipment, period. The counter-argument is that once content is received, people should be free to manipulate it for their own private use however they wish, so long as they are not violating copyright law.
I'm fairly confident the DMCA will come up at some point during this trial, and I'm also fairly confident that it will set the stage for the ultimate battle: defining Fair Use.
It's less violent than most games kids play these days, it requires a fair amount of real thinking (as opposed to just running around and shooting anything that moves), and it's more addictive than heroin.
This is why they will die.
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm convinced that the Internet is what will lead to the demise of the recording industry and the broadcast industry.
As it is today, radio and record sales are the two main ways for an artist to become popular, sell out their shows, and make money. However, there is a high barrier to entry; the recording and broadcast industries want to profit, and so they only support music that will make them money--regardless of quality.
But the Internet allows all artists to be heard, by all people, with no strings attached but the size of your pipeline. Since artists never get paid for record sales to begin with, it hardly matters whether their music gets copied online--so long as it's good, they'll still sell out their concerts.
Ten to twenty years from now, the recording industry will be a crumbling colossus. People will get sick of being force-fed their music, of having to pick between identical blonde models with equally bad style, of seeing the same old stuff on the charts every week. By then, the Internet will have become powerful enough that any artist who wants to be heard, will be.
That's a very good point; IBM and HP will still sell huge amounts of hardware, and who they choose to supply the software will make a big difference.
Red Hat has already made significant inroads in providing service and support for smaller businesses, and perhaps this is where they'll find their niche--small- and medium-sized systems. United Linux will have a hard time beating Red Hat in that market, since they do have a relatively strong presence. But if United Linux gets enough backing from giants like IBM and HP, it could become the open source standard for managing mainframes and large servers.
Either way, my computer at home is still going to run Debian.:)
Unless this new distribution offers something significantly better than what Red Hat already does--and it looks to me like it doesn't--then this means nothing. A large part of the business world is still uneasy about migrating to Linux; those who do decide to use it will undoubtedly pick a well-established name like Red Hat over a consortium of distributions with much weaker market presence.
People always change their views on life. One day you're absolutely positive you know what you want to do with your life, and the next day everything might change. You never know.
So even if you're certain you want to be a system administrator, you never know what the future might hold. If ten years from now you've had a moderately successful career as a sysadmin, but you have no college degree, there are going to be very few options available to you. (And despite what some people might tell you, it is much harder to go back to college when you're 25 than it is to start when you're 18.)
As long as you can afford it, go to college. It's fun, you'll learn a lot, you'll meet a lot of hot girls, and it will keep your opportunities open down the road.
I also hate when people try to make their opinions seem like fact.
Whereas I have thought through my arguments, provided reasonably concise support for the points I made, and made a few people think about something new, what have you done? You made neither an argument against what I said, nor any unique points of your own. All you've done is bitch and moan that I didn't do enough research to write an entire essay in a Slashdot post.
Free software is just the beginning of the next big evolution in computing technology. When you allow every single user of a system to improve the design of that system, you bring the network that much closer to the users. You allow so much more innovation and creativity with free software than with proprietary systems.
By placing free software at the center of all public technology efforts, you ensure that no matter what, the general public will be able to improve on the systems that its own government uses. Decades from now, it is my hope that free software will have transformed into the dominant force in the computing industry. We would have a world where every single computer user, no matter what their skill level, is able to contribute to the development and improvement of computing in general.
Imagine where all this could go in another few hundred years, once every person connected to the global computer network is able to improve on that network in every way possible. It could even be the next step in human civilization.
But that's distant future stuff, more rant than reality. The fact remains that making public technologies completely free, and completely open, is what is in the public's best interests. This is the future of technology, and it's sad that Peru has acknowledged it sooner than the US has.
That's a very good point--if we define Fair Use now, we could run into this same problem another thirty years down the road. So I rescind my previous post.
But if we can't define Fair Use without boxing ourselves in for the future, what can we do to prevent copyright holders (who spend lots of money on lawyers, and know how to knead the legal system) from running all over consumers?
So now companies are responsible not only for making sure their products don't violate copyright or patent laws, but for making sure their users don't as well. Everything gets so much easier when the burden of proof is placed on the accused.
When this all wraps up (probably more than a decade from now) I see one of two possible outcomes.
1) We will be transformed into an amazingly media-rich society, powered by the Internet. Artists will no longer need record companies for publicity; they'll sell out their concerts just by putting their music online for free. Broadcasters won't be able to make billions by simply selling the same damn product to every person in the country; in order to turn a profit, they'll have to come up with services that can be individually tuned to fit their customers' needs. (God forbid an aging industry should have to change its business model to remain profitable; that's just not the American way!)
...or, 2) The American judicial system will become a puppet for the disproportionately wealthy entertainment sector, making every other industry in the country accountable for enforcing copyright law (except for the copyright holders--why should they do any work, right?). America will cease to be the driving force in technological development, and hordes of companies and individuals will leave the country for someplace a bit more level-headed. (I know I will.)
No form of legislation can effectively curtail online piracy without placing undue restrictions on consumers. The main reason for this is simply that the fuzzy area between "Fair Use" and actual piracy is just... well, too fuzzy.
Legislators looking to pass laws against piracy must first pass laws that establish what is not piracy. It's like passing a law against property theft without first defining what constitutes a legal exchange of property.
I suggest something different. I propose that we pressure Congressmen and Senators to establish legislation that clearly defines what "Fair Use" is. Instead of leaving it up to judges (and long, expensive trials) to decide what is and is not acceptable use of media, let's spell it out for everyone. Media companies notwithstanding, there will be an enormous amount of public support for any legislator who takes it upon himself to do this.
Once our Fair Use rights are clearly defined, then it will be infinitely easier for the media companies and the technology industry to reach some sort of compromise on how to protect copyrights and protect our rights at the same time. Or maybe once our Fair Use rights are clearly defined, it will become glaringly obvious that digital media simply cannot be controlled by legislation.
Neither of these outcomes can be reached fairly, however, without first identifying those rights that must be protected. Passing laws against piracy without first explicitly stating what is not piracy will give the content industry (and their army of lobbyists) far too much power in restricting consumer activity.
Microsoft gave a visible shudder when Yahoo! found better ways of integrating their own Internet taskbar into Internet Explorer. The next step might be a "targeted desktop experience", or whatever they want to call it, where your start menu is kept up-to-date with local information or custom news or whatever.
I think it's actually a cool idea, but Microsoft definitely doesn't want other companies treading on a potential future market. Given XP's integration of Windows Messenger (and its absurdly cheerful look), one of Microsoft's long-term goals may be to turn every desktop into a web portal--customized, of course, through MSN.
In his written testimony, Mr. Jones said the states' proposals would confuse consumers, enabling competitors to cover up icons like the "Start" button on the Windows desktop screen that consumers use to navigate and even allowing a competing operating system like Linux to start up instead of Windows.
Yeah, God forbid we should allow a competing operating system to start up instead of Windows.
If this is the kind of stuff coming out of a Microsoft exec's mouth during trial, the states must be having a field day.
Now what's all this about the Start button? Maybe Microsoft has predicted that the next step for companies who are trying desperately to get into the desktop (Yahoo, etc.) to offer their own customized Start Menu replacements?
College students have it made -- most universities today provide you with all you need to run a server of your own making. (At a public university you may still run into some legal issues.)
When I'm home, though, cable works fine for running a small independent host.
First the record companies are going to look for public support for their anti-piracy crusade: legislation, taxes, anything they can touch. I think that from the general reaction to the SSSCA/CBDTPA, it is a pretty reasonable guess that support for these measures will not be forthcoming. If companies like the RIAA want to wage war, the public says, they can pay for it from their own coffers. And they will.
The next step will be for the media companies to take matters into their own hands, spending lots of money on anti-piracy advertising and plenty of lawsuits. They'll lose a serious chunk of change doing this, of course, but in their eyes it will be justified as protection of future revenue.
By this time, consumer opinion will be sufficiently turned against these companies as to foster even broader piracy networks and easier methods of digital reproduction. It's already incredibly easy to turn CDs into MP3s; think of how easy it will be in another two or three years, even with all these new copy-protection schemes. As piracy grows, the record companies will push back even harder; as they push back, piracy will continue to grow.
Meanwhile, as more artists get screwed over by recording companies (like in this Salon article), more artists will see the Web as a
cheap and easy vehicle for publicity. Eventually, I predict, some BIG
act (and I mean huge) will come up that distributes
its music completely free on the web, actually boosts its record and concert sales, and then the wave will come crashing down. Once a huge name is willing to fully endorse digital sharing, to use it as their publicity agent (instead of the record companies), they'll start an unstoppable trend.
After that, it'll only be a matter of sitting back and watching the RIAA slowly fade into obsolescence.
I ordered a phone online in September. They charged me $100 for the phone, and a $500 security deposit. I hastily called them up and told them to cancel the order, and bought service at a store in town. Two weeks later I got a phone in the mail. I packaged it up, sent it back, called them, said I didn't want it, and that I wanted my money back.
Months later, I kept getting bills saying I had $600 in credit, but never a check. At least twice I called up customer service and was told that they would put in a request to have the money sent to me, but I never received anything. I didn't get the process to actually move until this past week, when I had to speak to a sales manager just to get my money back.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this? The persistence of it leads me to believe that this is a somewhat under-the-table policy, not just a fluke. "If the customer doesn't want to fight for their money, then we'll just keep it."
I think any company today who makes a "Soft WiFi" card will recognize that they're cutting out a serious chunk of their potential customers. It's not like the peak days of WinModems, where Linux users were a negligible percentage to the consumer hardware industry.
This was a simple typo, borne of bad proofreading (or the fact that I had better things to do). I don't use.NET myself, so I don't really care about petty naming details.
Only the most asinine of AC trolls would take time to correct a minor slip like that. Go get a job.
People have been pointing out that Hailstorm/Persona was NOT the bulk of what.NET My Services is, that this isn't as bad a blow to Microsoft as some people are making it out to be. And they're right. Kind of. But I've seen this coming for years. I've known for so long that Microsoft only has so much steam left in it, and this is one of the first signs that it's slowing down.
Hailstorm was Microsoft's attempt to become the middleman in a wide range of web transactions. It didn't work, and for a good reason--companies don't like middlemen, especially those as powerful as Microsoft.
When you think about it,.NET My Services is the same thing. It's another Microsoft attempt to become the middleman, so to speak; they want to be the one in charge of how everyone works together. Doesn't it seem obvious at this point that technology companies will, sooner or later, go the same path with.NET as online businesses did with Hailstorm?
Granted, Microsoft has put a lot more marketing clout behind.NET My Services, so they probably aren't going away in the immediate future. But the technology industry is unpredictable, and it can change incredibly fast sometimes. We may be seeing the first steps towards an era of Microsoft-free computing.
Microsoft has not had the most exemplary record when it comes to filesystem changes. All their changes to FAT were sloppy hacks, and NTFS--while more stable than FAT32--has its own slew of issues.
On another note, do you think for even a second competitor's file formats will work as well as Microsoft's when this new OS becomes the Windows standard?
I'm glad to see this sort of thing -- the day has finally come when Microsoft tries to throw their weight around and the Open Source community gets to shout back just as loud. But I'm really not all that worried about Windows XP anymore; I haven't been for months. Here's why.
How many tech people have you talked to who are honestly enthusiastic about Windows XP? Granted, we Open Sourcers tend to group together, but even still, the vast majority of people I know who are serious about computing are infuriated as all hell about the direction Microsoft is going. I have relatives who are CTOs for large non-tech firms, and while they're still using Windows out of necessity, they're seriously looking at switching to Linux in a couple years. It looks to me like Microsoft, with their strong-arm tactics and "us or nothing" attitude, is alienating a very important part of their business: the people who understand technology.
I know people who used to be avid Windows 2000 supporters, and now they refuse to use XP. Whether it's the forced registration, or the new integrated software, or just Microsoft in general, they don't want to be force-fed anymore. "So what?" you say. "Microsoft will still take over the market." I think that's an accurate assumption, but -- which market?
I say that Microsoft has already put nails in the coffin of their share of the server industry. That isn't to say they aren't being successful; quite to the contrary, Microsoft (compared to the rest of the tech sector) is doing extremely well. But I say the software giant's peak is coming soon. Within a year or so, they'll hit maximum sales and maximum power, and then they'll level off. And sure enough, one by one, slowly but steadily, people will drop Microsoft in support of a more secure and reliable alternative: Linux. (No offense intended to the other OSS flavors out there, it's just that Linux is getting the most press.) Within three or four years, I predict that Microsoft will have lost a severely large percentage of the server market; the only demographic they'll manage to keep hold of will be the end users, the people who either don't know or don't care how to do anything other than open Word and play Solitaire. And that won't last forever.
Once Microsoft realizes it's screwed itself over with the server industry, it will be forced to reinvent itself as an even more "user-oriented" company; MSN will replace Windows as their dominant product, everything they do will be aimed at the average (read: clueless) computer user and his kids, and Microsoft will become more like AOL and Yahoo! than anything else. Then, as the general population slowly becomes more adept with technology, the barriers to change from Windows to an alternative OS will ease up, and Microsoft will finally start to lose their hold on the home PC market.
I give the company something in the ballpark of eight years before Chapter 11.
Microsoft has enough money to settle with all the class-action suits in the world. The feds don't really want to do anything either, because if Microsoft falls, the tech stock market will eat it. If there's anything that will bring Microsoft down, it will be across-the-board bad product design.
(And how many people are really going to pay money for a system as ugly as Windows XP, anyways?)
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."
Slashdot Mirror
Let nobody underestimate how big this is. This is, in a roundabout way, just the fight Hollywood wants.
I am not a lawyer, so I could be wrong, but the way I see it, this will determine whether it is legal to manipulate digital content received from a subscription service. The content companies want to prove that when you sign up to receive television signals, you can only use those signals the way they want you to -- through their services, with their approved equipment, period. The counter-argument is that once content is received, people should be free to manipulate it for their own private use however they wish, so long as they are not violating copyright law.
I'm fairly confident the DMCA will come up at some point during this trial, and I'm also fairly confident that it will set the stage for the ultimate battle: defining Fair Use.
Gentlemen, let's get ready to rumble.
It's less violent than most games kids play these days, it requires a fair amount of real thinking (as opposed to just running around and shooting anything that moves), and it's more addictive than heroin.
I'm convinced that the Internet is what will lead to the demise of the recording industry and the broadcast industry.
As it is today, radio and record sales are the two main ways for an artist to become popular, sell out their shows, and make money. However, there is a high barrier to entry; the recording and broadcast industries want to profit, and so they only support music that will make them money--regardless of quality.
But the Internet allows all artists to be heard, by all people, with no strings attached but the size of your pipeline. Since artists never get paid for record sales to begin with, it hardly matters whether their music gets copied online--so long as it's good, they'll still sell out their concerts.
Ten to twenty years from now, the recording industry will be a crumbling colossus. People will get sick of being force-fed their music, of having to pick between identical blonde models with equally bad style, of seeing the same old stuff on the charts every week. By then, the Internet will have become powerful enough that any artist who wants to be heard, will be.
That's a very good point; IBM and HP will still sell huge amounts of hardware, and who they choose to supply the software will make a big difference.
Red Hat has already made significant inroads in providing service and support for smaller businesses, and perhaps this is where they'll find their niche--small- and medium-sized systems. United Linux will have a hard time beating Red Hat in that market, since they do have a relatively strong presence. But if United Linux gets enough backing from giants like IBM and HP, it could become the open source standard for managing mainframes and large servers.
Either way, my computer at home is still going to run Debian. :)
Unless this new distribution offers something significantly better than what Red Hat already does--and it looks to me like it doesn't--then this means nothing. A large part of the business world is still uneasy about migrating to Linux; those who do decide to use it will undoubtedly pick a well-established name like Red Hat over a consortium of distributions with much weaker market presence.
...that I own the original versions. :)
People always change their views on life. One day you're absolutely positive you know what you want to do with your life, and the next day everything might change. You never know.
So even if you're certain you want to be a system administrator, you never know what the future might hold. If ten years from now you've had a moderately successful career as a sysadmin, but you have no college degree, there are going to be very few options available to you. (And despite what some people might tell you, it is much harder to go back to college when you're 25 than it is to start when you're 18.)
As long as you can afford it, go to college. It's fun, you'll learn a lot, you'll meet a lot of hot girls, and it will keep your opportunities open down the road.
Was this not reported on just this past Saturday?
Second sport.
I also hate when people try to make their opinions seem like fact.
Whereas I have thought through my arguments, provided reasonably concise support for the points I made, and made a few people think about something new, what have you done? You made neither an argument against what I said, nor any unique points of your own. All you've done is bitch and moan that I didn't do enough research to write an entire essay in a Slashdot post.
Go get a job.
Free software is just the beginning of the next big evolution in computing technology. When you allow every single user of a system to improve the design of that system, you bring the network that much closer to the users. You allow so much more innovation and creativity with free software than with proprietary systems.
By placing free software at the center of all public technology efforts, you ensure that no matter what, the general public will be able to improve on the systems that its own government uses. Decades from now, it is my hope that free software will have transformed into the dominant force in the computing industry. We would have a world where every single computer user, no matter what their skill level, is able to contribute to the development and improvement of computing in general.
Imagine where all this could go in another few hundred years, once every person connected to the global computer network is able to improve on that network in every way possible. It could even be the next step in human civilization.
But that's distant future stuff, more rant than reality. The fact remains that making public technologies completely free, and completely open, is what is in the public's best interests. This is the future of technology, and it's sad that Peru has acknowledged it sooner than the US has.
That's a very good point--if we define Fair Use now, we could run into this same problem another thirty years down the road. So I rescind my previous post.
But if we can't define Fair Use without boxing ourselves in for the future, what can we do to prevent copyright holders (who spend lots of money on lawyers, and know how to knead the legal system) from running all over consumers?
So now companies are responsible not only for making sure their products don't violate copyright or patent laws, but for making sure their users don't as well. Everything gets so much easier when the burden of proof is placed on the accused.
When this all wraps up (probably more than a decade from now) I see one of two possible outcomes.
1) We will be transformed into an amazingly media-rich society, powered by the Internet. Artists will no longer need record companies for publicity; they'll sell out their concerts just by putting their music online for free. Broadcasters won't be able to make billions by simply selling the same damn product to every person in the country; in order to turn a profit, they'll have to come up with services that can be individually tuned to fit their customers' needs. (God forbid an aging industry should have to change its business model to remain profitable; that's just not the American way!)
...or, 2) The American judicial system will become a puppet for the disproportionately wealthy entertainment sector, making every other industry in the country accountable for enforcing copyright law (except for the copyright holders--why should they do any work, right?). America will cease to be the driving force in technological development, and hordes of companies and individuals will leave the country for someplace a bit more level-headed. (I know I will.)
Place your bets, people.
No form of legislation can effectively curtail online piracy without placing undue restrictions on consumers. The main reason for this is simply that the fuzzy area between "Fair Use" and actual piracy is just... well, too fuzzy.
Legislators looking to pass laws against piracy must first pass laws that establish what is not piracy. It's like passing a law against property theft without first defining what constitutes a legal exchange of property.
I suggest something different. I propose that we pressure Congressmen and Senators to establish legislation that clearly defines what "Fair Use" is. Instead of leaving it up to judges (and long, expensive trials) to decide what is and is not acceptable use of media, let's spell it out for everyone. Media companies notwithstanding, there will be an enormous amount of public support for any legislator who takes it upon himself to do this.
Once our Fair Use rights are clearly defined, then it will be infinitely easier for the media companies and the technology industry to reach some sort of compromise on how to protect copyrights and protect our rights at the same time. Or maybe once our Fair Use rights are clearly defined, it will become glaringly obvious that digital media simply cannot be controlled by legislation.
Neither of these outcomes can be reached fairly, however, without first identifying those rights that must be protected. Passing laws against piracy without first explicitly stating what is not piracy will give the content industry (and their army of lobbyists) far too much power in restricting consumer activity.
Microsoft gave a visible shudder when Yahoo! found better ways of integrating their own Internet taskbar into Internet Explorer. The next step might be a "targeted desktop experience", or whatever they want to call it, where your start menu is kept up-to-date with local information or custom news or whatever.
I think it's actually a cool idea, but Microsoft definitely doesn't want other companies treading on a potential future market. Given XP's integration of Windows Messenger (and its absurdly cheerful look), one of Microsoft's long-term goals may be to turn every desktop into a web portal--customized, of course, through MSN.
In his written testimony, Mr. Jones said the states' proposals would confuse consumers, enabling competitors to cover up icons like the "Start" button on the Windows desktop screen that consumers use to navigate and even allowing a competing operating system like Linux to start up instead of Windows.
Yeah, God forbid we should allow a competing operating system to start up instead of Windows. If this is the kind of stuff coming out of a Microsoft exec's mouth during trial, the states must be having a field day.
Now what's all this about the Start button? Maybe Microsoft has predicted that the next step for companies who are trying desperately to get into the desktop (Yahoo, etc.) to offer their own customized Start Menu replacements?
College students have it made -- most universities today provide you with all you need to run a server of your own making. (At a public university you may still run into some legal issues.)
When I'm home, though, cable works fine for running a small independent host.
First the record companies are going to look for public support for their anti-piracy crusade: legislation, taxes, anything they can touch. I think that from the general reaction to the SSSCA/CBDTPA, it is a pretty reasonable guess that support for these measures will not be forthcoming. If companies like the RIAA want to wage war, the public says, they can pay for it from their own coffers. And they will.
The next step will be for the media companies to take matters into their own hands, spending lots of money on anti-piracy advertising and plenty of lawsuits. They'll lose a serious chunk of change doing this, of course, but in their eyes it will be justified as protection of future revenue.
By this time, consumer opinion will be sufficiently turned against these companies as to foster even broader piracy networks and easier methods of digital reproduction. It's already incredibly easy to turn CDs into MP3s; think of how easy it will be in another two or three years, even with all these new copy-protection schemes. As piracy grows, the record companies will push back even harder; as they push back, piracy will continue to grow.
Meanwhile, as more artists get screwed over by recording companies (like in this Salon article), more artists will see the Web as a cheap and easy vehicle for publicity. Eventually, I predict, some BIG act (and I mean huge) will come up that distributes its music completely free on the web, actually boosts its record and concert sales, and then the wave will come crashing down. Once a huge name is willing to fully endorse digital sharing, to use it as their publicity agent (instead of the record companies), they'll start an unstoppable trend.
After that, it'll only be a matter of sitting back and watching the RIAA slowly fade into obsolescence.
I ordered a phone online in September. They charged me $100 for the phone, and a $500 security deposit. I hastily called them up and told them to cancel the order, and bought service at a store in town. Two weeks later I got a phone in the mail. I packaged it up, sent it back, called them, said I didn't want it, and that I wanted my money back.
Months later, I kept getting bills saying I had $600 in credit, but never a check. At least twice I called up customer service and was told that they would put in a request to have the money sent to me, but I never received anything. I didn't get the process to actually move until this past week, when I had to speak to a sales manager just to get my money back.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this? The persistence of it leads me to believe that this is a somewhat under-the-table policy, not just a fluke. "If the customer doesn't want to fight for their money, then we'll just keep it."
Wouldn't it be fairly easy to demonstrate in court that people were implementing web services long before IBM or Microsoft patented it?
I think any company today who makes a "Soft WiFi" card will recognize that they're cutting out a serious chunk of their potential customers. It's not like the peak days of WinModems, where Linux users were a negligible percentage to the consumer hardware industry.
This was a simple typo, borne of bad proofreading (or the fact that I had better things to do). I don't use .NET myself, so I don't really care about petty naming details.
Only the most asinine of AC trolls would take time to correct a minor slip like that. Go get a job.
People have been pointing out that Hailstorm/Persona was NOT the bulk of what .NET My Services is, that this isn't as bad a blow to Microsoft as some people are making it out to be. And they're right. Kind of. But I've seen this coming for years. I've known for so long that Microsoft only has so much steam left in it, and this is one of the first signs that it's slowing down.
.NET My Services is the same thing. It's another Microsoft attempt to become the middleman, so to speak; they want to be the one in charge of how everyone works together. Doesn't it seem obvious at this point that technology companies will, sooner or later, go the same path with .NET as online businesses did with Hailstorm?
.NET My Services, so they probably aren't going away in the immediate future. But the technology industry is unpredictable, and it can change incredibly fast sometimes. We may be seeing the first steps towards an era of Microsoft-free computing.
Hailstorm was Microsoft's attempt to become the middleman in a wide range of web transactions. It didn't work, and for a good reason--companies don't like middlemen, especially those as powerful as Microsoft.
When you think about it,
Granted, Microsoft has put a lot more marketing clout behind
Microsoft has not had the most exemplary record when it comes to filesystem changes. All their changes to FAT were sloppy hacks, and NTFS--while more stable than FAT32--has its own slew of issues.
On another note, do you think for even a second competitor's file formats will work as well as Microsoft's when this new OS becomes the Windows standard?
I'm glad to see this sort of thing -- the day has finally come when Microsoft tries to throw their weight around and the Open Source community gets to shout back just as loud. But I'm really not all that worried about Windows XP anymore; I haven't been for months. Here's why.
How many tech people have you talked to who are honestly enthusiastic about Windows XP? Granted, we Open Sourcers tend to group together, but even still, the vast majority of people I know who are serious about computing are infuriated as all hell about the direction Microsoft is going. I have relatives who are CTOs for large non-tech firms, and while they're still using Windows out of necessity, they're seriously looking at switching to Linux in a couple years. It looks to me like Microsoft, with their strong-arm tactics and "us or nothing" attitude, is alienating a very important part of their business: the people who understand technology.
I know people who used to be avid Windows 2000 supporters, and now they refuse to use XP. Whether it's the forced registration, or the new integrated software, or just Microsoft in general, they don't want to be force-fed anymore. "So what?" you say. "Microsoft will still take over the market." I think that's an accurate assumption, but -- which market?
I say that Microsoft has already put nails in the coffin of their share of the server industry. That isn't to say they aren't being successful; quite to the contrary, Microsoft (compared to the rest of the tech sector) is doing extremely well. But I say the software giant's peak is coming soon. Within a year or so, they'll hit maximum sales and maximum power, and then they'll level off. And sure enough, one by one, slowly but steadily, people will drop Microsoft in support of a more secure and reliable alternative: Linux. (No offense intended to the other OSS flavors out there, it's just that Linux is getting the most press.) Within three or four years, I predict that Microsoft will have lost a severely large percentage of the server market; the only demographic they'll manage to keep hold of will be the end users, the people who either don't know or don't care how to do anything other than open Word and play Solitaire. And that won't last forever.
Once Microsoft realizes it's screwed itself over with the server industry, it will be forced to reinvent itself as an even more "user-oriented" company; MSN will replace Windows as their dominant product, everything they do will be aimed at the average (read: clueless) computer user and his kids, and Microsoft will become more like AOL and Yahoo! than anything else. Then, as the general population slowly becomes more adept with technology, the barriers to change from Windows to an alternative OS will ease up, and Microsoft will finally start to lose their hold on the home PC market.
I give the company something in the ballpark of eight years before Chapter 11.
Microsoft has enough money to settle with all the class-action suits in the world. The feds don't really want to do anything either, because if Microsoft falls, the tech stock market will eat it. If there's anything that will bring Microsoft down, it will be across-the-board bad product design.
(And how many people are really going to pay money for a system as ugly as Windows XP, anyways?)
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."