How music labels, Hollywood studios and consumers answer that question could determine whether the software giant dominates digital media the way it does Web browsers or desktop productivity applications, say analysts.
Microsoft Protecting Rights–or Windows?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I can’t understand why anyone would expect or believe that Microsoft would have anything BUT a self-interested motive in this. It does not seem to be at all ulterior; they seem to be quite upfront about it. It’s the motive we would expect of any for-profit corporation. To expect any corporation to act in any other way is unrealistic in the extreme.
Of course they’re trying to leverage DRM so they can sell more copies of Windows. Or force people to buy copies of Windows. But Microsoft and the recording industry haven’t thought this whole thing through. Nobody will want a PC that can’t play music off a CD. People want to “Rip, Mix, and Burn,” to put it into Apple parlance. Furthermore, Windows Media is not that good. On the video side it had some merit, but Real has overtaken it once again. I’ve also been impressed with Quicktime/MPEG-4, which are much less resource-hungry than Windows Media. WMP is unusable on my Mac. RealPlayer and Quicktime work fine. You figure it out.
As a related aside, I work in broadcasting. We do all sorts of things with audio files that wouldn’t be umm…”legit” for a normal person to do. But we can do them because we pay tens of thousands of dollars every year to ASCAP and BMI for licenses to the songs. We’re in kind of a quandary with our Win-based production machines, because we’re unable to upgrade Windows Media Player, due to the new licensing terms. It would be a major problem to come in one day and find that MS had installed DRM software on our machine (which you authorize them to do by accepting the license for WMP9), and none of our audio production could be done. It’s quite frustrating.
“The question is whether they’re going to use their technology as a pawn for Microsoft proliferation or whether they’re going to sell good technology,” said Yankee analyst Ryan Jones. “That’s really the concern.”
Past behavior indicates, “it’s the proliferation play,” Jones said.
What is this guy talking about? Is he really making the claim that microsoft does not sell good technology? Why would someone buy technology that doesn’t meet their needs? The fact of the matter is that most people who buy and use Microsoft products do so because they provide some value. I certainly know that I could not do my job without using Windows. We are heavily reliant on NTLM and ActiveX. Also, all our tools are Win32. In theory I could port them to some other platform, but why would I want to spend the time? It seems like a cost inaffective use of my resources.
There was something my computing languages professor used to say, “Use the right tool for the right job.” I belive he was right, there is as little sense in trying to force incompatible platform technologies to operate together as there is in writing an entire OS in Pearl. Sure, it can be done, but why?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for hobby projects, and doing things just to see if you can. I just believe that this type of activity should be conducted extracirricularly. Work is defined by productivity, and people should use whatever tools make their work the most productive. In some cases, that may be Linux and Corel. In some cases, it is OSX and Maya. In my case, it is Windows and Office. No, I think that Mr. Jones’s claim that Microsoft does not sell ‘good technology’ is a load of horse pucky.
I have a MS Intelemouse Explorer, I like it pretty good, and I have a MS Gamepad Pro witch is ok to, the funny thing is my MS mouse works great in SuSE. Every button and the wheel, with no driver. Windows needs a driver, go figure.
@Nickolas James Stop buying the hardware, because you are still feeding the Borg. Support Logitech or one of the smaller guys.
Remember Microsoft was involved in a “ANTI-TRUST” case, they cannot therefore be TRUSTED. So this is merely a ploy in which MS gets total marketshare of the media formats. It’ll be like .docs being used in 90% of the market and causing headaches for the other 10%. Video and audio formats would go the same way just so MS gain further server sales.
the funny thing is my MS mouse works great in SuSE. Every button and the wheel, with no driver. Windows needs a driver, go figure.
That’s because Linux vndors know what most people use in the world and what is widely spread and used by the people and even if it is not popular they will still do it. They include drivers with the distribution to support as much hardware as possible. The same is the case with graphics card and sound card. Ever wondered why your graphics card and sound card work without without installing separete drivers in Linux? It’s because they include the drivers and I bet most vendors don’t even bother creating drivers for Linux so most of these drivers are created by the GNU communicty.
Actually the question that we need to discuss is not about Microsoft, but about news.com. Does the news.com and C|Net make up these news just for more reading, or do they really believe in something. In particular, we already know that CNet produce lots of stupid news related with Microsoft. For example even the news has nothing to do with Microsoft, we always see an attack sentence to Microsoft, especially they give their own opinions as facts. Is this because CNet has some financial relations with competitors of Microsoft, or is it because of some other reasons. I think this is the question that we really need to discuss, since CNet really doesn’t make much sense. Remember that they claimed Google was mixing search results with ads, even though anybody with brain will say that they clearly mark the sponsored links and ads.
So do you have proof that cnet is making up quotes and attributing them to people when they didn’t say those things?
that’s what journalism is – interviewing and quoting people. Now what they say may be nonsense or not. Let’s debate that.
by the way, windows media files won’t run on my mac. I tried last night to view some files about Moviemaker 2 on MS’s website. They wouldn’t play on my mac. This whole windows media thing is lock in, plain and simple. They want to force people to have to use windows – they want you need it to exchange word processing files, listen to CDs on your computer, etc. etc. So then when you are forced to buy it, it doesn’t matter what price they charge and they don’t need to make the product better, just good enough (i.e., mediocre).
>>>This whole windows media thing is lock in, plain and simple.
Microsoft offers wmp9 codecs at lesser price than mpeg4. The reason why you can’t view those files on a mac because apple doesn’t want to pay microsoft money. Samething for linux media players.
The lock-in is in the streaming server side, not the client side.
One claim that CNet is quoting analysts. Actually they don’t, and that’s the problem. What CNet does is to find out people who say something they want to say, and then quote them. For example, related with security issues, you initially read all those claims against Microsoft, usually you don’t understand much, really what’s going on. Sometimes however, in cases where there is a really outrageous stupid claim, CNet does quote others, and then you start to see that, actually what CNet initially claim is not true at all. For example, in one case, CNet reports a guys report as true, and then only at the end it says that most of the security experts do not think that it is a security issue at all. It is not one expert, it is the majority of experts. CNet is like slashdot, you see all sort of claims against Microsoft, which doesn’t make sense at all. Unless you are a person like appleforever, you will suspect that those stories are baseless most of the time.
MS is doing exactly what makes business sense. They have a windows monopoly. People must buy it (at least they think so, and they are right for certain uses). Why not perpetuate it. I mean if you are CEO of MS, do you say, gee, I’m not going to do anything to keep this good monopoly going that makes us 80 percent profit margins? Of course not. Lots of analysts have recognized what any person with an ounce of intelligence and objectivity sees — MS has a strong financial interest in locking in people to windows. Windows media is just another prong of this. Clearly they aren’t making any money on it given the hundreds of millions spent and the giveaway price.
Here is a reason why it is obvious that some troll and actually make fun of the readers here. For example, some say MS is trying to lock you in. However, they don’t say for example Apple is also trying to lock you in. When you buy Apple hardware, you are locked in more than any other platform. You can’t switch to Intel or AMD, you have to buy everything from Apple, and with more money. You have to pay more to buy less. Once you start to use Apple, you can’t switch back easily. You will have your various files which can not be converted back to a Windows or Linux file.
Another reason why this guy is trolling is that, he is claiming that Quicktime was always an open standard, whereas it was always proprietary Apple file format. The guy is a complete troll, since he says that Mpeg4 is open standard, so Quicktime was always open actually, even before Mpeg4. I think you have to be very very careful about this guy. He is a complete troll.