Can you play high-definition movies on Microsoft's new Vista operating system? Apparently not. A recent test with a DVD of high-definition content produced a comical series of error messages from Windows Vista.
For an in-depth technical analysis of the costs of Windows Vista, the best current summary is here; the author concludes, in part,
The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution channel.The essay is fascinating; the expensive hardware on your new Vista-compatible computer will spend much of its time coping with digital rights management to protect the rights of movie studios and record companies, and the slightest hardware or software incompatibility will result in immediately "fuzzing" of your audio and video.
The essay does explain one mystery: Why are new Windows Vista computers so expensive? With the price of computer hardware plummeting, I expected this new generation of computers would be less expensive and more capable. but exactly the opposite is true. The reason isn't just software bloat in Windows Vista: the computer components must be re-designed to accommodate Windows Vista requirements, such as fuzzing out video and audio when the environment is "unsafe." This re-design significantly raises costs and chews up enormous resources on the computer.
Even worse, hardware vendors also have a software problem. Hardware vendors use small, specific pieces of software to run their hardware — those pesky "drivers" that sometimes must be re-installed. After many years, hardware vendors finally managed to disaggregate software from hardware to a single driver that works across an entire product line; this makes it easier to issue upgrades and easier to resolve problems. But with Windows Vista, it's no longer possible to use a single disaggregated driver, because that might interfere with Vista's digital rights management schemes; now the hardware manufacturers have to re-create the nightmare of dozens of pieces of incompatible software.
In the book, I discuss how Windows 2000 and Windows XP attempted to aggregate the Internet browser into the operating system, a deliberate attempt to run the wheels backwards and stifle innovation. (Certainly Windows XP was otherwise pointless, which was why it was such a failure in the corporate world.) As for Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft is far more interested in becoming a platform for digital content than they are in doing anything else, such as providing a secure computing environment without viruses or malware. Their design goals for Windows Vista is the aggregation of content into their platform; you pay the price and they reap the benefits.
Topics: · intellectual+property · microsoft
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