"Palladium" and TCPA

[Owen Lewis]

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Tomlinson <pwt@iosis.co.uk>
To: <ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Sent: 30 June 2002 08:54
Subject: Re: "Palladium" and TCPA


> Ross Anderson wrote on Saturday, June 29, 2002 9:18 PM:
> > I'm not impressed by arguments that TCPA's mechanisms will be
> insufficiently
> > strong, and that some people will defeat them. Even if they work only
25%
> > of the time, they will make a huge difference to Microsoft's bottom
line,
> > and the holes can be closed down gradually.
>
> ........In the case of utility software
> such as M$ Office, just as in the case of music CDs, most of those who
have
> pirate copies would not buy the real thing if they could not pirate a
copy.
> For M$ Office, rival software products would grow in importance, and

I agree. There is a perverse logic that suggests, for Western markets which
are close to saturation,the more copies of Office, legal or illegal, there
are in use, the tighter becomes M$'s grip not only on the present
marketplace but on the next generation of products. I (paid to) convert my
business to Office in 97, having given up the unequal struggle to maintain
file compatibility with businesses we associate with whilst using an
eclectic mixture  of very able business applications from other stables.
Bill Gates should be glad to give the stuff away to kids and those who are
broke since it kills his competitors harder than it kills him.

However, when one looks at emergent markets, such as China, the maths of
shrugging off the rip-offs may well not look as attractive.

> preventing them from processing M$ Office files, it seems to me, would be
an
> anti-trust violation. Also, there are those of us who would just not
bother
> to upgrade their software until all this protectionism blows over.
>
> M$ would be well advised to follow Corel Draw and continue to sell and
> support earlier versions of their software for the forseeable future, back
> as far as Win 98 and Office 97.

Quite so. We bought an XP Pro upgrade for one of our Win 98 machines last
week, as a toe in the water and to check for any compatibility issues with
some of the homebrewed software we sell. For that one machine - a four page
report was produced, advising me that if we continued to  install XP Iwe may
have almost UKP1K  of XP-incompatible software and hardware that will need
to be replaced (all of which was bought in the last two years). And then
there is the much larger cost in reduced output whilst the use of new
software is learned . In short for a small business, the cost of a complete
change over to XP is likely to be of the order of KP 10K - and to obtain
what exactly?

No way. It is far cheaper for me to buy a new, basic, desktop box on which
to do the requisite compatibility testing and to continue using the  audio,
ISDN, fax, scanner, printer  and sundry utility programs which meet our
current needs very well and which we have no need to change.

IMO, if M$ attempts to force the rate of change to  XP - compatible
products, it will, for the first time since since its introduction of Win
95, offer a serious window of opportunity to the makers of other OS.

Owen