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

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

Oh, dear. I find myself attempting to correct Stephen Turnbull twice in
one day. And he's no Josh. :-) Clearly, someone has gone and taken him
away and replaced him with RMS.

(Geekspeek note, for those not familiar with it: "clearly" is correctly
translated as, "you are an idiot." Whom I'm addressing above is left as
an exercise left for the reader.)

On Sat, 18 Aug 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> So what you're saying is that WinTel could choose to simply ignore DRM
> and not have the capability to play DRM-ed content.  Right?

Right.

> Sure, that's an option, but if the cost of adding DRM is less than the
> additional revenue, the market is "demanding" it.  A dollar earned
> from "weak demand" or "yarase demand" is still a dollar.

Well, I'm a bit worried that I must be missing something here, since
this is your area of expertise. But here's my view on this.

Yes, the market is demanding that MS produce boxes to play DVDs on home
theatre systems. But in that sense, the market is demanding that every
company do that, since they'll pay anybody who does it. In the same
sense, the market is demanding that Intel go back to producing memory.

So why doesn't Intel produce memory (modulo the odd market crash)? They
used to, so they know how to do it. They've got plenty of smart people,
and the ability to produce or contract out to fabs in Korea, Taiwan,
China, or anywhere else that's cheap. If they put their minds to it,
they could do it just as well as Micron of whomever else is in the
business of kicking the stuff out.

If you find some particular reason memory is a bad example, find
something that always makes money. Why doesn't Intel do video rentals,
where mostly you just pick up the margin? Or make toasters? Run a call
centre? Run an outsourced software plant in India?

It's not just about market demand: it's about return on investment.
Sure, Intel could make money on memory. But it can make a lot more on
CPUs, because there's less competition. Micron can't make a CPU; only
a few companies can. So Intel can make more money by concentrating on
higher-margin markets, and expanding there.

In fact, it's not about where there's demand, since there's demand
everywhere; it's about picking which demands you want to try to satisfy.
And as well as engineering resources, managment time, energy and focus
are all limited. You're better of doing what you already do well, even
if there's slightly less profit in any one chunk of it, if by doing that
you can do more of it.

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, and compete with
IBM and so on instead, or Enterprise Software in a much bigger way than
they have (competing with SAP and Oracle and the like), or hardware,
where they could have tried to leverage their software advantage to
compete against the likes of HP and Dell), or into CPUs, as Sun, which
also started out mostly with a strong software base (remember the number
of 680x0 workstation makers that used to be out there?), successfully
did for many years. And they might well have done better at any of those
than they are doing consumer electronics; they certainly have not been
anywhere near as successful as Apple has in that area.

> I think the odds are pretty good that the cost is *zero* + marketing
> expense for both companies. 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,
probably as expensive or (IMHO) more expensive than coding. Plucking
code out of a set-top box or whatever and dropping it into Windows is
not likely to be a trivial operation.

(BTW, I looked up XEmacs on Wikipedia just to make sure I had the name
right, and just made my evening. "Users can reconfigure almost all
of the functionality in the editor by using Emacs Lisp, a simple and
easy-to-learn language" now has "[citation needed]" appended to it. I
love Wikis!)

> If content the consumers want is available only in DRM'ed format, they
> will demand DRM at the same time that they decry it.

Indeed. I seem to own over 200 DVDs, and I'm not quite sure how all this
came about. I do know why I own both a US and a Japanese Playstation
2 on which to play them (and the odd game): in that sense, DRM has
generated direct profit for Sony even from a non-pirate.

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