No word about Vista's DRM and the difficulty this is causing many multimedia content providers and others. Economist David K. Levine called Vista "one of the colossal business blunders of all time" in the following article in the Against Monopoly blog:
Here's an excerpt: "the demand for degraded computers that can play "premium content" is limited. People just don't buy computers to play movies on them. Michele and I previously dug out some numbers on the size of the "premium content" industry versus the IT industry. According to the RIAA, the value of all CD's, live presentations, music videos, dvds in 1998 was 13.72 billion US$. According to the SOI, in 1998 the business receipts of the computer and electronic product manufacturing including both hardware and software was 560.27 billion US$. I looked up at the census 1997 revenue in the telecommunications industry: 260.50 billion US$. So: are people going to give up their general purpose computers they spend $560 billion on to access less than $14 billion in content?"
From an economist's perspective, a $13.8 billion industry is negligible compared with a $560 billion industry.
http://againstmonopoly.org/index.php?limit=10&chunk=0...
Here's an excerpt: "the demand for degraded computers that can play "premium content" is limited. People just don't buy computers to play movies on them. Michele and I previously dug out some numbers on the size of the "premium content" industry versus the IT industry. According to the RIAA, the value of all CD's, live presentations, music videos, dvds in 1998 was 13.72 billion US$. According to the SOI, in 1998 the business receipts of the computer and electronic product manufacturing including both hardware and software was 560.27 billion US$. I looked up at the census 1997 revenue in the telecommunications industry: 260.50 billion US$. So: are people going to give up their general purpose computers they spend $560 billion on to access less than $14 billion in content?"
From an economist's perspective, a $13.8 billion industry is negligible compared with a $560 billion industry.