Don Marti has some an interesting ideas – I recommend his piece on DRM. Unfortunately, he’s also a member of a club that only seems to exist on the Internet: the Blinkered Linux Evangelists.
He says, "In the 1990s, did customers want overpriced UNIX from bickering vendors or stable-any-day-we-promise Windows NT? Sorry, neither one works for us. Support Linux, please. Or on-line services. AOL or Compuserve? We’ll take the Internet, thanks."
Indeed. Imagine how strange it would be to live in a world where AOL was the online service with the most subscribers, or where Windows NT and its derivatives had the highest operating system market share…
I think he’s partly right about AOL: they did start off as a company providing much more than simply internet access, and were vaguely forced by market pressures into being little more than an ISP. For example, their custom browser (being a port of Mozilla) is surely on its way out.
You’ve got a very good point about WinNT though: outside of specalist server markets, it is the defacto standard, and it hasn’t changed beyond recognition in the way AOL has.
Quite an interesting article though: especially the points about DRM on email etc.
DRM
Files aren’t described by users as DRM-poisoned for nothing.
Read
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.communications2.pdf
It’s frankly an excellent piece of analysis.
The issue with DRM is that is tries to prevent the whole point of networking people / machines etc., which is to facilitate information exchange. For that reason and that reason alone I will not buy any DRM locked shit. Before someone points out I’m using XP which is DRM protected, who said I bought it? Which brings me to my second point, DRM is and always can be broken, anything that feeds information to me in a human processable format can be duplicated irrespective of DRM funkiness, which removes the whole argument for having DRM in the first place.