RE: [tlug] Re: [CoLoCo] RESPECT MICROSOFT

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Curt Sampson writes:
>
> > Microsoft made a conscious choice to try to move into the consumer
> > electronics market, and that is what led to the DRM demand. They could
> > have just as easily decided to move into consulting,
>
> "Easily" in the "talk is cheap" sense?

Not "easily," "just as easily."

I'd argue that Microsoft's entry into consumer electronics hasn't been
easy at all. They've allegedly lost over four billion dollars on the
Xbox and friends so far, Sony must be distinctly unhappy, and I'd be
willing to bet that not only other consumer electronics manufacturers,
but also makers of media PCs are looking nervously over their shoulders
right now. You argue that they'd lose badly in a consulting or hardware
market; I agree. My point is that they're also not exactly doing well in
this market, but they don't care enough about the prospects of losing in
a major way for quite a while that the problems you raised about them
doing consulting or hardware would be any worse than what they're going
through now in consumer electronics.

Perhaps I'd get a better sense of what you mean if you explained to me
just how you feel MS is doing better in consumer electronics than if
they'd gone into consulting or hardware, and how you feel that they had
good reason to believe that this would be the case.

In particular, about the "nobody trusts Microsoft" comment, I don't
think that that's the case for the cusomters in a enterprise consulting
market. They're already heavily invested in MS products; why would they
trust MS less than they'd trust IBM to help them out on enterprise
integration projects?

> > > In other words, Microsoft and Intel need to have the technology
> > > for use in embedded systems aimed at the consumer market
> > > anyway. As long as they have it, why not add it to the WinTel
> > > product lines, too?
> >
> > Ok, now we're firmly back in an area where I do have expertise, as
> > do you. And I'm not buying this for a minute. As you know from your
> > extensive experience with XEmacs development, integration is expensive,
>
> I don't do device drivers.  This is all about device drivers, no?

No. While device drivers are involved, especially in the case of things
such as DRM, it touches everything in the system, and an inappropriately
designed (from the point of view of that purpose) part of the system
elsewhere can make it impossible to achieve the functionality they're
looking to achieve.

> Correct me if I wrong, but AFAIK the same drivers with a bit of shim
> are often used for both Linux and the BSDs.

You are wrong. Often the core of a driver shares a bunch of similar
code, but even amongst systems as similar as Linux and NetBSD (which
are about the two furthest apart open source Unix-like systems) porting
a driver requires a lot of changes and work. Porting a driver from and
an embedded real-time OS designed for consumer electronics devices to
such a massively different system such as Windows would not even be
called a port; it would be called a rewrite. And, as I mentioned above,
for things such as DRM, you might not be able to do it at all without
substantially changing the target OS. This is one reason you don't
see XP systems capable of playing HD-DVD and Blue-Ray content at full
resolution.

> Well, my assumption is that the set-top box *is* running Windows CE or
> whatever the stripped down device manager version is called. Windows
> CE only makes a lot of sense if it presents the same APIs as its big
> brother does, no?

Who says Windows CE makes any sense? :-)

But you also need to consider, especially for DRM, the issue of what
else the user can do with the system. Most people are not putting new
code on to their DVD players, or even their Xboxes, and when they do
it's considered a crack, and MS works pretty hard to fix the security
hole.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com