Slap on the Wrist for Microsoft China

[EDIT:As Michael Foord points out in the comments, the actions described below were taken by a company with which Microsoft had contracted. Microsoft appear to have acted in good faith once the duplicity was discovered].

I'm not terribly happy with the "Evil Empire" theory of Microsoft. There's little doubt that when the company was younger it was an aggressive competitor up to and occasionally beyond the limits of the law, and there was a culture of "what's good for Microsoft is good for the world". The company has been known in the past to take information obtained from smaller partner companies and use it to build competing products and services, to the partner's disadvantage.

But I know quite a few people who work in Microsoft, and none of them are the kind of people who I would expect to indulge in any kind of ethically questionable behavior. I have assumed, perhaps naively, that as the company grew its culture would be molded more by the requirements of the legal jurisdictions it operated in, and less by the cowboy ethic of earlier years. Silly me.

The latest and most egregious example of Microsoft rip-off behavior comes from China, where the Microsoft subsidiary in November published a "Chinese copy" of Plurk Asia's micro-blogging service. Following the link will make it obvious this isn't just a cosmetic copy - the similarities appear to extend deep into the code base.

Given Microsoft's holier-than-thou approach to piracy issues, particularly with regard to the Chinese and other Asian markets, it makes one wonder who took the decision to go ahead with this project, and why heads haven't already rolled - or maybe they have? I hope (but alas sincerely doubt) that it costs Microsoft a lot of money to put this right, since it appears that money is the only thing that Microsoft understands.

Something Smells

If you were at PyCon you probably noticed that netbooks are becoming more popular. PyCon delegates being geeks, I don't remember seeing a single one that wasn't running some form of Linux, though Microsoft do support the little machines with Windows XP. This in itself is an admission that Vista, their current operating system, is a resource hog. As a Vista user all I am prepared to say is "get me out of here", though the day-to-day experience is made bearable [short pause while all applications lock up for 90 seconds and the disk hammers away madly at I know not what] by the (open source) Cygwin command shell and the (open source) VirtualBox virtual machine that lets me operate virtual Linux hosts.

I don't have a netbook yet (though I have already bought one for my wife), but it's only a matter of time. I currently lug 6.6 pounds of laptop around with me for the large 17" screen that I find useful for development and the 4GB of memory, which was a lot for a laptop a couple of years ago. I may extend the life of the machine by upsizing the drive to 500GB, but I definitely want my next portable machine to be lighter, and lighter means smaller (though nowadays not necessarily much less powerful). In other words, it's the coming trend.

The manufacturers (who are all in the far East, naturally) have detected this trend, and are pushing out new hardware faster than a sow can push piglets. All of this new hardware can run at least three different operating systems: Linux, Windows and Android. Users have been expressing their discontent with the higher price of Windows systems in the desktop market, but didn't have a lot of alternative. However, Microsoft realized that if they charged their usual premium for Windows XP on the netbooks people would just laugh and buy a system with one of the alternatives loaded.

So the bottom line is that Microsoft are almost giving XP away (and why wouldn't they, the money it's already made them) just as a damage-control measure. It's vital to Microsoft that Linux and Android aren't seen as viable alternatives to Windows, particularly since the beta program of Windows 7 is making it seem like an operating system whose principal selling-point is the ability to switch its features off.

Enter the Taiwanese Computex trade show that opened yesterday. Qualcomm were showing a new Asus netbook running the Android operating system, but on the Asus stand there was no sign at all of this startling new development. In fact Asustek's vice chairman John Tsang said, shortly after sharing the stage with Intel and Microsoft representatives, that the Android notebook was not a priority. Android still has a way to go to be totally user-friendly on a netbook, but if Qualcomm could show it, why couldn't Asus? Were they, perhaps, being polite to a major business partner?

The UK PCWorld chain also said it is stopping selling anything but Windows through itsbricks-and-mortar stores, though mail-order buyers still have the Linux option. When I see press releases like that I am always intrigued about whether they are induced purely by market forces or whether some backroom maneuvering isn't involved.

One thing's certain. No matter what they have done for Mac sales, Apple's long-running TV adverts have positioned Windows (synonymous in the public mind with "PC") as an unstable, unreliable, bug-ridden inconvenient platform. Now it's beginning to look as though the hardware industry is becoming more independent of Microsoft for the software necessary to run its devices, which I see as a good thing.

Microsoft stockholders may, of course, disagree. I wouldn't necessarily sell your Microsoft stock right now. Just don't buy too much more.

Microsoft at OSCON

The last session I attended before leaving for the airport was the Friday morning plenary session. Sam Ranji of Microsoft announced several new initiatives (documented in his Port 25 blog), including sponsorship of the Apache Software Foundation. This doesn't mean Microsoft are abandoning IIS development.

After the keynotes were over there was a Q&A session, but it seemed like the AV technicians (who seemed to do a pretty awesome job overall) hadn't set up monitor speakers, and so those on stage found it difficult to hear the questions. Which were mostly for Sam, and sometimes a little hostile!

I tried to ask him how it would be possible to change the corporate ethos so that stupidities like the recent OOXML debacle aren't repeated, but I'm not sure the desire to help survived the mangling by the sound system. Microsoft have been a sponsor member of the Python Software Foundation for some time now, and they are as welcome as all our other members.

It was clear, listening to Sam speak with delegates after his talk, that he "gets" open source. It's frustrating to read people complaining about Microsoft without being prepared to engage and argue that open source and full interoperability can actually help the company meet its business goals more effectively. By doing so we can help Sam get the ears of the business-line managers, and thereby promote open source from within.

I left him with a business card and an offer of assistance. It remains to be seen whether anything comes of it.

Microsoft Can't Support DRM

So it seems that "PlaysForSure" actually meant "Plays until the first time you change your computer or operating system after August 31, 2008". About ten days ago Microsoft's general manager for MSN Entertainment and Video Services sent out an email to customers advising them that license keys can no longer be retrieved and new computers cannot be activated after that date.

This is a very clear indication that digital rights management (DRM) is a loss for the consumer. If I wanted to keep songs from my eight-track stereo around then there was nothing to stop me from transferring them to audio cassette or CD (despite the RIAA's rather specious arguments that this was a breach of copyright). If I'd been silly enough to trust Microsoft's assertion that DRM offered me protections then I'd have to get ready to shell out for new copies after any change to my playing environment.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has written to Microsoft stating in no uncertain terms that (by suggesting that users copy the music to a CD and transfer it to new computers that way) the company "is asking its customers to invest more time, labor and money in order to continue to enjoy the music for which they have already paid".

If Microsoft, with all their resources, can't keep a DRM scheme working then there is little chance for anyone else. It also doesn't encourage customers to trust the company if it is prepared to abandon them in this way, though they might have anticipated this desertion when Microsoft closed the MSN store when it started selling the Zune.

I suspect this is the beginning of the end of DRM. Let it rest in peace.

Industry Support for Python Broadens

In a move of significance to all Python users Sun Microsystems has broadened its support for dynamic languages still further. There was some interest in their announcement less than six months ago that they had hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, developers of JRuby.

Today we learn that they have recruited Frank Wierzbicki and Ted Leung. Frank has been one of the two principal maintainers of the Jython project for a good long time now, and has brought the language forward to the point where it supports the newnew-style classes, a significant milestone in compatibility with CPython. Ted is a long-time member of the Apache Software Foundation who was a member of the OSAF's Chandler team for the last four years.

Sun was a great employer for me (I was badge number 1536, I believe, starting back in 1985), and I hope that Frank and Ted enjoy working there. It's certainly a great place to meet people with exceptional intelligence, and the fact that both Sun and Microsoft are now visibly taking a serious approach to dynamic languages in general and Python in particular is terrific.

Sun and Microsoft are both sponsoring this year's PyCon, for which registrations recently topped 900. If you want to meet them there then you still have four days to register at the pre-conference prices!

Back to the Drawing Board for OOXML?

Even some pretty shady manipulation of the various national committees doesn't appear to have helped Microsoft much in their bid to get OOXML, the proprietary format describing Office documents, declared an international standard. The ISO/EIC Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva has ended with what can at best be considered an inconclusive result, with only eight of the 'P' countries and ten countries altogether registering any kind of vote on the main matter put to them.

The real problem here is Microsoft's attempt, with the assistance of ECMA, to put the standard through the fast track process; that was clearly not appropriate for a standard of such complexity and political significance. There were over 1,100 dispositions to be decided at the meeting, and only 20 substantive dispositions received any measure of individual attention.

The meeting's convenor attempted to reach a conclusion by bundling together 900 dispositions that had not been discussed and asking the delegations to vote on each without discussion. Unfortunately this led to over 80% of the delegations either refusing to register a vote or abstaining on all dispositions.

The real problem is that rather than being a standard driven by the requirement to describe structured documents of all types, OOXML is simply an XML-based description of an existing proprietary format.If Microsoft truly want to embrace standardization they should now get behind the Open Office ODF format and support it with all the weight they can. This seems unlikely given their prior position on ODF support, which can at best be described as half-hearted. They apparently have a lot of work to do to make OOXML acceptable.

Technically there is now a 30-day period in which the ISO/IEC members can vote to approve the adoption of OOXML. I doubt even Microsoft has sufficient clout to persuade them that this travesty or a process represents a satisfactory basis on which to build an international standard.

EU Slam Microsoft with Further Fine

The saga continues. The European Commission have fought Microsoft to ensure that, in Europe at least, they have to play by the rules rather than making them up as they go along. Unlike the US government (which not only refused to declare them a monopoly despite their domination of the desktop but also failed to properly enforce the rather tame sanctions they imposed), the EU has repeatedly told Microsoft to stop behaving in an anti-competitive way.

The latest action, in which the Commission sued Microsoft for failing to comply with previous antitrust decisions, has resulted in a €899 m ($1.35bn) fine. Though it has only led to a 12c drop in the stock this represents about a tenth of Microsoft's annual profits, and may finally give the company reason to think seriously about complying with court rulings rather than ignoring them.

This is the first time in 50 years that such action has been taken by the EU, because every other company losing such an action chose to comply with the spirit and the letter of the decisions.

Microsoft faces further trouble with the EU, which recently started a new investigation into Microsoft business practices relating to their dominance in the word processing and spreadsheet arenas, and to determine whether the company unfairly tied Internet Explorer to Windows. The recent announcement about API sharing will also come under scutiny, and the European Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, observed it's the fifth time that Microsoft has made an announcement about improving interoperability. She said "Talk is cheap. Let's wait and let's find the reality in this case. They have to deliver and implement."

Don't Compete and Microsoft Won't Sue

It's obvious that not everyone is happy about Microsoft's most recent attempt to woo the open source community by releasing API details and offering them for use with a covenant "not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols".

It isn't yet clear exactly what qualifies as "non-commercial distribution", but it's an interesting approach: Microsoft has always complained (sometimes unjustifiably) about the GPL. Now authors of open source products can use the newly-released information as long as they don't gain commercial benefit by doing so. This could be seen as opening up, or simply as a nice piece of spite. It will definitely result in the development of interoperable projects that will take market share away from Microsoft, leaving software dollars looking for other places to be spent.

I suspect that a lot of people will say that this doesn't go far enough, but it's a sea change in Microsoft's approach and has doubtless taken lots of internal discussion. If you develop a commercial product based on Microsoft's patented technologies then you will still need a license from them before you go to market. As long as you believe software patents are reasonable this is nothing to complain about.

Personally I have never thought software patents reasonable, but Microsoft are to be congratulated for trying to promote their technologies in a more open way. Let's hope this is just the first step to fully open standards, only twenty years too late.

Microsoft Fully Engages Open Source?

Now this is really interesting. Michael Foord reports that a lead Microsoft developer has responded to an issue report by saying

One option might be a non-technical solution: Instead of you redistributing the library (or modified library) we distribute it w/ IronPython - and then you're just including the combined package. There's other reasons why it'd be good for us to do this (help, encodings, warnings, etc...).

Michael's understanding of this is in reference to the complete Python standard library rather than just the Decimal module. If so this is excellent news for all Python users, since it will broaden the common code base between CPython and IronPython and make portability between the two environments easier to achieve. It would be interesting to know whether the developers and maintainers of FePy, the open source IronPython distribution, would view such a move with apprehension or relief. Internationalization support can be a significant effort, and Microsoft have a lot of experience in that area.

My own hope is that this move might eventually broaden the support base for the standard library, which hasn't developed as much as I had hoped in 2.5. There will be some sort of reorganization of the library in (I think) 3.1, but I haven't heard much about that yet.

Michael Foord's blog post is amusingly prioritized from an industry perspective, which is one of the charms of the blog: he was reporting big things for Resolver, which I am sure will become a significant Python application in short order. But it's a little like "Three Hundred Japanese Killed in Earthquake: Ohio Man Breaks Ankle" with a different twist. Good luck in Barcelona, Michael (and in New York and Paris too, guys).

I suspect that we have just seen the magic of the Python license at work: there isn't much doubt in my mind that Python's explicit permission to redistribute for broad purposes without opening up your own code makes it easier for organizations with a large proprietary code base to incorporate the language into their own technologies. I know from reports at PyCon that Jim Hugunin has been surprising audiences inside and outside Microsoft at how easy it is to do things in the .NET environment with Python. Surely full IronPython support in Visual Studio must inevitably follow.

And, In Related News ... ?

So I read the output from my daily agent and it includes this gem:

PyWPS releases version 2.0.0

Turns out that even while I was blundering along completely unaware of version 1.something, the PyWPS Development Team have been slaving away to produce version 2.0! Now there's dedication.

Sorry to seem cynical. It is in fact an entirely worthy site, as a look at pywps.wald.intevation.org should convince anybody. As usual my ignorance's limits continue to widen. This strikes me as an amazing opportunity for a bright Python programmer or two to succeed. Geospatial data processing is hot right now.

I am extremely glad to hear that there is an open standard for this stuff. I don't suppose (hope springing, as it does, eternal in the human breast) that Microsoft are on board with the standard. Perhaps they already decided to just buy the committee when the votes come around.

Yet Another Longhorn Delay

Why don't Microsoft just stop announcing product plans? Their releases inevitably turn out to be later than anticipated, and the resulting back-pedaling just makes them look like bad planners.

As you might have read, the Microsoft Server Division Blog has detailed another delay - it now looks like Windows Server 2008 will actually be released in 2008 (assuming they manage to avoid another 9 months of slippage).

It's interesting that the explanation for the delay tries to mask the fact that Microsoft are apparently not yet satisfied with product quality. If the quality of some earlier products is anything to go by then it doesn't bode well for Server 2008. Still, nobody said running the largest software company in the world would be easy.

Developers Migrating Away from Windows

In a research report from Evans Data Corporation we learn that last year's decline in the targeting of Windows as a primary development platform has been repeated. John Andrews of Evans says "it's clear that a shift away Windows began about two years ago, and the data show that this migration is now accelerating. Linux has benefited, but we also see corresponding growth in niche operating systems for non-traditional client devices. The landscape is changing."

If I were a Microsoft shareholder I might be happier if I could see Microsoft engaging more aggressively with the open source community. It's difficult to steer something with the inertia of a large organization like Microsoft, though, so perhaps they are changing course as fast as is practical. Ultimately even Microsoft will have to realize that they can't do everything by themselves, and specifically that they can't dictate standards (e.g. WSDL) to the rest of the world.

The Python Community

This page is clearly seditious, as it claims that there are activities that are "more fun" than programming in Python*.

It does start to give you some idea of the breadth of the Python community. Strange as it may seem, after 40 years working with information technology I like the Python community as a place I don't necessarily have to do technical stuff. So I have tended to organize conferences rather than present at them.

With PyCon and EuroPython, and now individual conferences all over Europe and South America starting up under the PyCon [the page is a bit out of date] banner, Python has a truly international community.

Through its various electronic media, both interactive (newsgroups/mailing lists, Wiki, IRC) and with groupings based on geography and technical interests, everyone gets a chance to contribute no matter where in the world they are. The jobs list is also worldwide.

The Python Software Foundation's Advocacy Coordinator (Jeff Rush) certainly has his hands full!

* ObGeek: Outrageous suggestion.

Microsoft Strategy is Patently Ridiculous

A recent Fortune article, Microsoft claims software like Linux violates its patents, suggests that the Ballmer empire is about to start seeking royalties from users of open source software whihc, the company claims, violates 235 of their patents.

I don't think they have thought this through. The US Supreme Court has so far issued no ruling on whether software is even patentable, despite the Patent Office's ridiculous willingness to issue patents on techniques that fail even the simplest test of obviousness. When the most powerful software company in the world starts throwing its weight around to gain revenue from those patents it will force the issue somewhat.

The inevitable result will be a Supreme Court ruling that inevitably weakens, or even removes altogether, the protection that patents have been assumed to provide by those who have invested heavily in them. Microsoft senior VP Brad Smith claims, for example, that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents.ourse the joke is that nobody has any idea how many patents Microsoft products violate because, unlike the open source projects Microsoft complains about, the code that comprises them isn't available for public scrutiny.

MSDN Webmasters: Read Peter Norvig!

Peter Norvig's an interesting chap. I mean, head of research for Google, that's got to be an interesting job, right? One of the blogs in Planet Python (I can't remember whose, unfortunately, because the "How'd I get here" button in Firefox can't tell me what Thunderbird was looking at when I clicked a link (oh, all right, three minutes research tells me it was Peter Bengtsson)) recently pointed me at a recent Norvig gem, the spelling corrector in 21 lines of Python.

I don't believe I've previously mentioned in these pages that I am dabbling with ASP.NET. Shrieks of horror resound around the halls of Holden Web. It's been interesting in the sense of the Chinese curse that dooms you to live in "interesting times". The learning curve is steep (and any regular readers of comp.lang.python will know that that metaphor has been lately subjected to the Belgian logic chopper, to nobody's very great illumination). But I digress.

One of the things I have spent a lot of time doing, given the large-ish nature of the framework I am trying to learn, is look things up in the MSDN documentation. Anyone who has corresponded with me will know that the standard of my typing is roughly the same as if you were to pay a squirrel to dance on the keyboard, which is to say I make typographical errors with a regularity that makes monotony seem interesting - the Secret Service characterize my typing style as "frequent use of backspace key". Consequently I have, in the last 24 hours, entered "sqldatasourec reference" into the MSDN search page no less than three separate times (see, when I find a way to bollix a word up I stick with it - I am only half a touch typist, so short entries not for human consumption are even more frequently wrong).

Three times I have been confronted with the helpful message "We're sorry, we couldn't find any results containing sqldatasourec reference". Now this is exceedingly strange. In trying to verify this behavior I made yet another error, entering the search string as "sqldatasource referenec", and while I saw the same(-ish) error message there was above it the helpful, dare I say Googlesque, question "Did you mean: sqldatasource reference" - which, of course, I did. Perhaps the correction corpus should be extended to include the subject material?

Just for devilment I entered the same two search phrases into Google's engine and sure enough it corrected them both. The obvious conclusion must be that Google know more about the content of MSDN than Microsoft do, but surely it wouldn't be fair to say that. Or maybe it would ...

Give Me a Break, Microsoft

Well, it's going to be quite a long goodbye, but today I finally and irrevocably decided to stop buying Windows. As with most decisions of its kind this hasn't happened overnight. There have been the little annoyances, the bloat as more and more bits and pieces clamor for run time and screen real-estate, the ever-increasing startup time, but what's finally pushed me over the top is the Windows Genuine Advantage (or, as I like to think of it, the Make Microsoft Richer) program. I've been saying for over ten years now that Microsoft will become "the first IBM of the twenty-first century" and this program, coupled with the digital rights management (DRM) approach embodied in Windows Vista, has finally made me realize I am sick of this snake oil.

Windows Genuine Advantage has been bugging me for a while, sitting there as an uninstalled update. Eventually, as it was designed to, the continued notification on restart became annoying enough that I decided "what the hell, this Windows came from Dell, why don't I just install it and stop this annoyance". So I did. Right at the end there was a check box that said "when I click finish show me the benefits of Windows Advantage" or some such, and rather than uncheck it I thought I'd see if Microsoft could persuade me that this effort had in some trivial way been worthwhile. Unfortunately the justifications seem mostly to be bogus in the extreme.

First example: "A recent report from the market research firm IDC found that, if the global software piracy rate was lowered just 10 percentage points over the next 4 years, this would contribute a total of 2.4 million new jobs and $400 billion in economic growth to the global economy." This, accompanied by a link (that would have opened several popups had Firefox been dumb enough to let it) to the Business Software Alliance web site and an IDC white paper on "Expanding the Frontiers of Our Digital Future - Reducing Software Piracy to Accelerate Global IT Benefits". For some reason they go to great lengths to hide the URL of that white paper, and there appear to be a family of these documents, each tailored to their specific audiences, so the link I've included might not be "your" content if you come from somewhere where the prinicpal economic impact of IT has been to reduce the amount that can be spent on things like clean drinking water.

On page 4 we see, under the heading Who Wins and Why the point that "Governments benefit from $67 billion in new tax revenues for needed services that could [according to a unstated OECD cost estimates for government services] be used to provide:

• 33 million computers for schools

• 45 million people with health care

• 6.6 million people with college educations

• 11 million children with schooling

• 435 million people with job training, or

• 132 million families with services like day care, maternity, or home help services
  

The snag here, of course, is in that little word could, since the same revenues could also be used to prosecute America's war in Iraq for a further eight months. When I ask myself which is more likely I don't conclude that Republican crocodile tears about "big government" will suddenly cause a sea-change in US political behavior.

On page 8 the authors try to convince us that "Lower Software Piracy Produces Higher IT Benefits". This section is accompanied by a wonderful graphic which I reproduce here as a classic example of how correlation is frequently taken to be causality. And yet I can find nothing anywhere in the paper that suggests the graphic might not equally well be entitled "Economic Growth Starts with High Piracy Rates" or "Poor People Steal Software Rather Than Do Without". The one thing IDC's methodology did not do was to look at single countries' change in "IT tax benefits" as the piracy rate changed, which it seems to me would be the only convincing way to demonstrate the benefits of such a change.

But I digress. In their discussions of the Genuine Software Initiative, Microsoft explain that downloading illegally-obtained software increases the chances of infection by malware and identity theft. Clearly these are things we would all like to avoid (and for my part it's why I tend not to buy anything from dodgy characters down back streets). They go on to say "In addition ... installing and using counterfeit software can prevent customers from obtaining some updates and premium add-ons." In other words, Microsoft will punish you still further for acquiring illegal software by refusing to provide updates to non-genuine copies. This seems fair enough, and it seems to me is the real thrust of Microsoft's policies: they don't care about your possible malware and identity theft issues (otherwise they would make their own products more secure), they care about whether they receive the revenue or not. The rest is just hokum designed to make people fearful about software theft, masquerading as a concern for the consumer.

I have to admit that Microsoft's update also bugged me by creating an automatic reboot event. This might not normally have been too troublesome (I had deferred it several times, and can only presume that the window appeared and consumed a random newline to gain permission to restart the system) had it not occurred during the installation of software. Aarrgghh!

The thing that really makes me want to run away from Windows, however, is Vista and its draconian approach to product registration and DRM issues. On the latter topic it's as though Microsoft were already a fully-fledged member of the Hollywood hegemony (which might give us clues about its media ambitions: I am sure that Microsoft is clever enough to sense the diminishing returns from software production). This paper by Peter Gutman enumerates some of the many ways in which DRM paranoia has caused Microsoft to choose to degrade content presentation and disable functionality that many users will desire.

With all the brains that Microsoft has at its disposal (and despite my occasional scathing criticism of the company and its products Microsoft does employ many very clever people), the best approach they could come up with for securing content in the 64-bit Vista environment was an insistence that drivers be digitally signed and approved by Microsoft. Fortunately it took about a month for NV Labs in India to design a system that completely subverted these protections. It's clear that Microsoft, like Hollywood, just doesn't understand that copy protection schemes are a busted flush. But they still continue to wrong-headedly pursue them because they know the majority of consumers will accept the technology unmodified and not even realize that in many legislations (i.e. those not subject to provisions similar to those of the USA's stupid Digital Millennium Copyright Act) their legal rights to fair-use copying are infringed by such systems.

One quite amusing result of Windows' present-day incorporation of DRM features is that in five or ten years' time Microsoft will have the content producers by the nuts. I can't say I'm sorry about that one. Microsoft like to paint themselves as subject to Hollywood's whims, but they are actually very cleverly positioning themselves to control the distribution channel. This would allow Microsoft to say "if you don't like our deal, tough, because it's the only game in town". This would be true if they weren't so busy throwing the desktop away. People are going to be really pissed when they find that they can't play their HD content on Vista, or that they have to repurchase after a disk crash.

The only systems I have left using Windows are laptops, and it's becoming increasingly easy to buy a laptop without a Windows you never plan to use. Unfortunately this won't stop me having to deal with people who can only provide me with low-resolution content because they can only talk to me over what Microsoft regard as an insecure (by which they mean non-protectable) channel. Microsoft say:

Digital distribution offers consumers a convenient way to access their favorite content at any time, and with content protected with Windows Media DRM 10 they'll have even greater flexibility and choice. Today consumers can choose from a variety of content service providers, a multitude of devices, and a variety of "purchase and download" payment options and subscription models. Windows Media DRM 10 ensures that consumers will be able to enjoy even greater flexibility and choice by allowing them to acquire and/or transfer their subscription content to the devices of their choosing.

I say this is complete tosh. The benefits of DRM are for the content owners and content providers, and Windows DRM allows them to provide copy-protected content that they can disable simply by adding it to a Certificate Revocation List. The "greater flexibiity and choice" is specious: Microsoft assume that content providers would choose not to make their content available digitally without DRM schemes, but in fact there has been no effective demonstration of this assertion. But I am used to corporate America pretending that their profit plans are really for my benefit.

Gutman says at the start of his paper "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history". It certainly puts them in the running to become a shadow of their former selves. Notice, by the way, that while IBM is also a shadow of its former self it is still a significant organization.It just no longer has the 75% of the world computer market that it used to. When Microsoft looks back thirty years hence I hope it will realize that this obsession with DRM was what lost it the desktop dominance that fueled its growth into the largest software company in the world. I just hope they still sponsor PyCon.