MS DRM in a Brick Form - Who Exactly Ordered That?
Suddenly the new Microsoft Portable
Media Center Player is an ‘ipod killer.’ And the Segway is the death
of walking.
The logic of a
portable Mp3 player (ipod or otherwise) is evident. People like to listen to
music while doing other things in their daily lives EVERYDAY. Mp3's are simply
an extension of the trend started with car
radios-boomboxes-walkman’s-portable CD players-Mp3 players are simply the
technological advancement of
that.
Moreover - music is
for the most part – short and does not require 90-100% of your attention.
Listening to music allows you to interact in other ways (walking around,
reading, driving, even working in many cases, etc ...) and holds up well
repetitive-wise.
Video is
pretty much NONE of those things especially when the screen is tiny. You need to
devote 100% of your attention to get any benefit.
So how often in EVERYDAY
circumstances do you say - damn, I could be watching some TV now and pretty much
STOP whatever else I’m
doing?
Sound like something you
can do while driving or
working?
And really, how
often can you watch that episode of SEINFELD in a row? There are some songs that
hold up with 3-4 listens one right the other - any TV show or
movie?
That leads to the
logistics of it. To rip an CD album to Mp3 takes maybe a couple minutes and to
load to an ipod a few seconds or maybe 20 minutes to load thousands of
tracks.
How long is it
going to take to convert my video to WMA with DRM? Hours? Even if by some
miracle, they can encode in real time, that’s 25 minutes for every sitcom
(minus commercials). Of course, movies are probably what people want to load
most – well, you can’t rip DVD’s – not legally and what
you do rip and encode into the player can NOT be removed or played elsewhere.
So, who is really going to
take the time to convert 170 hours of TV/movies to WMP DRM that can’t be
played anywhere else?
(And
that's presuming you don't want to swap anything
out).
Will MS sell some of
the devices? Sure. Take the number of people who have bought Tablet PC’s
and divide by 75%. Real journalists should look to see what numbers MS said
would sell by now and what numbers were actually sold. So much for MS vaulted
marketing. Sure, it’s the worldwide economy slump – that’s why
people aren’t buying tablet Pc’s – it must be true –
it’s in a Microsoft press release.
Does the media or analyst
just print the PR Word document as their feature story because they’re
unwilling to understand the situation or simply because it’s all just too
much technology for them to
understand?
Is this a
mass-market product? No. Do the vast majority of portable Mp3 player users want
a much heavier device at a much greater cost just because it has it a color
screen? Why switch?
Do
portable DVD users want a heavier device that cannot play ANY
DVD’s?
Do parents who
have car DVD players want to switch to something that requires to illegally
encode DVD’s or should they save the $700 and just buy a bigger DVD
holder? (not to mention the time spent
encoding).
Do
savvy/hacker/cracker users who are illegally encoding DVD’s to DiVX or QT
and watching them on laptops or their portable Archos want to switch to a device
that requires everything have MS’s DRM before you can transfer it over and
never be able to transfer it back off? Yeah,
right.
So, what does that
leave MS? A couple thousand people who want a portable device who are willing to
put up with the weight – maybe all their flights are 15 hours long and
they have time to watch ten or 15 movies and don’t want to bother to carry
around DVD’s … or maybe night watchmen who can afford $700 for a
TV-like device … but that’s
it.
But why did MS even
built such a thing?
A) When
in doubt – add features. They could not come out with an Mp3 player
without looking like they were so-3 generations ago so what better than just to
throw in every feature under the moon. It’s just brochureware –
it’s an ipod killer because it can video, music, photos – all in
color! The same brochureware is how they won the battle of Lotus123 versus Excel
so old habits die-hard. When in doubt, just add more checkmarks to the brochure
grid.
B) Because the goal of MS
is now to figure how to sell you everything that gets them a constant revenue
stream (you just have to read the memo from Bill Gates to Warren Buffet) …
and because they have $60 billion in the bank, they can wait almost anyone out.
If they can get a device out there that is WMP and convince movie studios and
record labels that they have consumers, then the studios will have to release
movies in WMP only. All they want is $1 from everyone on the planet on a monthly
basis (for now) – eventually, $1 every other week
…
And because MS has
to play nice, they can’t release a machine without DRM – and
that’s the final straw that kills that kills this camel (literally in a
committee-design-joke and metaphorical
sense).
It’s a brick
with a lock.
Who ordered
that?
Posted: Tue - March 23, 2004 at 12:04 AM