Category: Software Industry

Apple: When is enough DRM enough?

Posted by DarkJedi – February 18, 2009

Coming from the company, who’s CEO a year back claimed that he would love to be able to provide music over iTunes without DRM, one could be surprised to see Apple’s latest claim: Jailbraking a phone is suddenly against the DMCA... Suddenly you find Apple siding with the likes of MPAA and realize one thing: Apple is only against DRM as long as they keep complete control of their customer and their market. The entire ecosystem around Apple’s products, from the iPod to the iPhone and iTunes are surrounded by guarding technologies that “protect” the customer against other choices than that of Apple. Meanwhile the customers are complaining widespread about DRM… A complain that apparently goes on deaf ears at Apple!

Naturally Apple gets its fair beating on blogs and criticism for being this arrogant on the DRM issue, but one would not expect them to receive a direct attack on this issue from Microsoft. However, Steve “Throwing Chairs” Ballmer apparent goes out criticising Apple for being a closed company… Guess it takes one to know one :)

It is, none the less,  strange to hear Steve Jobs talk about Apple as an open company, when their entire moneychain is built around fencing in their customers completely. In my opinion they should rethink their strategy and become an open company! But who cares?…. As long as there are customers for their fenced-in technology they will continue to build more DRM into their products!

The Game of Protection

Posted by DarkJedi – February 17, 2009

What is the difference between protecting your Intellectual Property from Illegal Copying and Trying to control the consumer and the free market? The difference is often difficult to spot if you are a company in this digital age apparently… The first thing that goes wrong is that you start of with the assumption that every possible customer is a criminal. The second thing that goes terribly wrong is that you mistake illegal copying with stealing. You do not loose the original when you copy – big difference! Imagine someone stealing the Mona Lisa compared to someone who can make a perfect duplicate… BIG difference! The third and last mistake is that companies thinks that this problem can be solved using DRM…

How did they expect their customers to react when they are essentially taking over the rights of the customer’s PC? … And when customers complain they keep singing that old, worn-out song of piracy problems even though nothing in the ever-booming sales numbers of videogames supports this! Let’s be realistic here. This has nothing to do with piracy and the company already knows this. They are instead fighting a market they have little or no control over and which costs them millions of dollars each month: The second-hand game market. Normally you would not be against the forces of the free market and just be happy that you are in a market that keeps growing with incredible speed in the midths of a major financial crisis… but not in this market! They want to control the customer, their PC and instead lease their products for full price…

Of course when you act that way in the face of your customers you better not mess up and that’s exactly what Epic did with their major title “Gears of War”. Of course EA had already created a great fuss on the market by creating some of the most restricted DRM on the games market ever on their release of their major hope, Spore, which was suppose to take over the success of The Sims. However, they quickly found out that in this digital age gamers will let their voices be heard quickly once you try to screw them like EA did. It didn’t help that the CEO of EA came out and showed the whole world what little understanding of their customers and how much arrogancy EA had at that point. Later on EA put the same titles on Steam – now without the DRM…

Now, there’s no denying that piracy exists to some degree, but since the numbers can never be validated it will always be used as a poor excuse. However, as Valve and others keep reminding us: Pirates are just unsatisfied customers! Why not try to find out at what price mark pirates vanish, like you do with other software in third world countries? Why not offer the choice between a cheaper copy with DRM and the “normal” game for a normal price without DRM – thereby letting customers show their intent with their vallets. Naturally this can only be done if the companies start to make it clearer on the boxes for their games what restrictions actually applies when they sell DRM-ridden titles.

Ubisoft has already had its trouble with DRM and are now searching for new alternatives. They have now released their newest Prince of Persia game for PC without DRM to see how it fares. Naturally it can easy become a quick excuse for Ubisoft: “See… We did it without DRM and we didn’t sell 100 million copies over night! Pirates will never change!”. A poor game will never sell – even without DRM.

At this point in time gamers are fed up with non-functional DRM schemes that only hurts the paying customers. Pirates never feel the poor quality of DRM since their version never contain any, which in itself is the clearest point one can make in this matter. The DRM doesn’t help because every title is out there in a pirated version – WITHOUT DRM – so only the remaining paying customers are being screwed. Lately gamers, together with the EFF, have started speaking out publicly about the many problems in DRM, which are illegally taking away user-granted rights without consent.

Let’s hope that some headroom is finally made. The situation is unacceptable. We all know that DRM is doomed to fail. A perfect solution doesn’t exists and never will. It is clear now that this situation with ever increasing strictness of DRM is a passing period – however, one that is annoying to be living in. In five years time everything will be digitally sold and shipped and at that point those silly schemes will have been replaced by a few centralized, transparent dsitribution solutions, like Steam. God, I wish I had a time machine… and so should many of the game publishing companies! EA and Epic aren’t the last to make a big public scandal on DRM and who knows which company will end up being remembered as the Sony of the gaming world with their version of the XCP copy protection and the following massive lawsuit, followed by a publicity nightmare… I can’t wait :)

Sony’s problem

Posted by DarkJedi – February 7, 2009

Red as blood. That is the only way to describe the latest numbers of lacking income at Sony. A company that once was at the top of the hardware business with enormous successes such as the Walkman, the Trinitron TV technology and the PlayStation 1 and 2. A hardware company that lead the business with innovation for many years. Now the times have changed and some might be wondering why. The answer, however, is painfully obvious… Sony is no longer one company, but rather a gathering of businesses with opposite directed interests.

The three faces of Sony is their hardware business, Sony Pictures in the movie industry and Sony BMG in the music business. The main problem appears, however, in their software department. While the hardware business is trying to create open, innovative hardware, the two content businesses Sony Pictures and Sony BMG is trying to prevent that hardware from being used in piracy. Here is where the customer gets completely forgotten. We then see failures such as the rootkit fiasco in their CD publishing part and the Walkman relaunched that was supposed to smash the iPod but failed completely because of unusable software as it was too ridden with DRM and copy protection technology making it impossible for customers to use. The Walkman’s price was slashed by more than half, but little did it help. The software was useless and people kept returning their Walkmans as they saw them as broken.

Sony, however, learned nothing from this. They still struggle with technologies that Sony Pictures and Sony BMG wanted to push in order to control their customers. Think of the many failed formats Sony has tried to push: ATRAC, MiniDisc, SACD, MemoryStick and so forth. ATRAC is a perfect example here. When the rest of the market had already accepted MP3 as the standard and Microsoft was pushing WMA Sony kept forcing their poor customers onto ATRAC and nothing else. After several years of being practically the laughing stock of the MP3-player market with a ridiculously small percentage they finally yielded to MP3 and released the Walkman player which could play both formats. However, the software was so riddled with DRM og copy protection technologies that it failed completely. Hardware is only as good as its software. Why didn’t they learn?

Even though music has been distributed over the Internet for nearly fifteen years Sony BMG and the rest of the music industry still hasn’t found a digital strategy. In this field Sony is also showing its many faces. It wants to give its customers as many options as possible, but also to completely control their use. This can be seen clearly in the fact that Sony is one of the companies pushing the hardest for the power to use selectable output – a technology that takes away a lot of the consumers rights without asking. So on one side Sony wants to push HD content in all your equipment – on the other side Sony wants complete control to fully disable all your equipment and remove the ability to display the HD content.

Then came the PlayStation 3 and Sony’s newest push of technologies. Now it wanted its customers onto the Blu-Ray path, so that it could force new copy protection technologies onto its poor customers. Another HD technology riddled with DRM. However, when one focuses too much on technology and marketing and forgets about software, which has always been Sony’s soft spot, one is set up for a major disappointment – especially when one is as arrogant as Sony Entertainment. The PlayStation 3 didn’t quite know what kind of machine it wanted to be. It wanted to be a game console, but also a media center and a Blu-Ray player… but as everyone knows: The Jack of All Trades is a Master of None… And that also happened with the PlayStation 3, who is suffering greatly on the market today.The holiday sales has shown that in this time around Sony is way behind its two competitors…

What Sony failed to do Nintendo did to perfection. They focused their console on a major market and didn’t put everything into the console – only what the market was asking for. The result is remarkable – especially compared to the once master of the market, Sony. Even their newest competitor, Microsoft, understood where they needed to beat Sony. Microsoft didn’t have Sony’s innovation in hardware or even remotely their experience in this field. When it comes to software, however, Microsoft is million miles ahead of Sony. They made the right tools for developing software on their platform and they made a brilliant working network service in Live far ahead of Sony’s PSN, which most of all looked like a small afterthought from Sony in hindsight of Microsoft’s success. Microsoft success came from ensuring a lot more titles than Sony did – especially when it came to exclusives, where Sony was once master. Sony simply forgot that consoles are about games. At the same time Microsoft is cutting prices making it harder for Sony to sell consoles, who are already seen as expensive…

Times has changed. Hardware is no longer everything. These days a console is measured by its software and in that field Sony is having serious problems – not only with its countless delays, but also with the quality of the software, which almost always fails to live up to the hype. A clear example of Sony’s problem with software is that every game studio claims that it is much simpler and thereby cheaper to develop on Microsoft’s Xbox platform compared to Sony’s PlayStation platform – even such former Sony exclusives as Square Enix.What is Sony’s response to this criticism? Well, even more strange… They claim that they have made it difficult to develop on the PlayStation 3 on purpose to make it last the ten years they somehow expect this console to last – even though it is far behind all its competitors in every way… sheeesh!

The strangest thing about this is that Sony doesn’t seem to learn anything. They keep on lying through their teeth and spinning numbers in their marketing. They keep on screwing their customers with DRM and copy protection and the removal of consumer rights, using lobbying. One would think that a company that makes a PR nightmare like the CD rootkit would learn something, but it doesn’t seem to happen. What Sony needs a common sense czar…

On Gaming Piracy…

Posted by DarkJedi – December 21, 2008

I just read this rather long, but somewhat serious, article on Piracy in regards to computer games… Naturally a business guy like that would end up with a conclusion sounding like this: Don’t do piracy and it’s okay to do DRM as long you behave!

Well, frankly I don’t quite agree! I hate piracy as much as the next guy. No, I don’t find it to be an “okay demonstration against some big business, who is doing you wrong!”. People that pirate are just freeloaders! They do not understand the massive commitment and work it requires to make a game these days – even a poor game (which the market is apparently filled with). I don’t like demos myself. They always leave all kinds of crap on my computer and I hate those regular re-installs. I can, to some degree, understand those people that claim that too many titles these days are utter crap, wasted money, or just not enough bang for the money (like Mirror’s Edge with only 6 hours of gameplay) and therefore try out the pirate version before shelling out good cash. However, guys that use this excuse over and over and never actually buy anything as they keep claiming that there are no good titles: Shut the fuck up! If there were no good titles how come you spend 20 hours plus every week gaming?!… I hate those guys! Stop complaining about game quality when you don’t support good games! Stop complaining about poor performance, too many bugs, poor service when you are using a pirate version, riddled with malware and virusses! Buy good games … it’s that easy!

Games are often good value for money – especially compared to movies, where you get 1,5 – 2,5 hours of entertainment for the approx. same price where the games often deliver 20 – 40 hours of gameplay and a more immersive and often better social experience!

However, the one area where I hate the conclusion of that article is on DRM… I refuse to accept that crappy DRM schemes on my computer! I am not a pirate, i am not a thief… I have 60 plus original titles on my PC alone, not counting my console games… I refuse to receive a copy of a game that denies me much more than the pirate version, which is available for free! Instead offer some free extra stuff and good online parts for us paying customers – NOT CRAPPY DRM-schemes! Hint: they don’t work and they are a nightmare to support! Just give it up and let the market decide! Then it will be easier for the companies to expose the ever growing freeloaders! Yes, I know… companies like EA will still make a lot of poor value titles or easy follow ups on public franchises without any proper content or gameplay, but then don’t buy them … And don’t go for the pirate version of a game you claim is poor!

I hate those double standards… It is easy to shout your moralistic view all over the internet and find a common voice… It is a bit more difficult to live by those beliefs! And believe me when I say that you fucking freeloaders don’t make it anymore easy on those of us that actually pay for good games and don’t pirate! So grow up and smell the free market! Vote with your wallet, not your sorry cry-baby voice!

Now, another reason I personally hate DRM is something that is rarely mentioned in the internet article, but matters a lot for me. I take backup of my games. I hate having to have the physical disc laying around everywhere. In the fully digital distribution age this will not be a problem, but we are not there yet, so it is! Therefore I make backups on my NAS, which is a nice way to access my games when I want to play them. A nice solution, I like to think. The problem is with titles that contain DRM that I have to go to shady sites on the Internet to get noCD patches to get them to work without a DVD in the drive. Why should I be punished for being a faithful customer compared to the pirate? Why shall I be forced onto shady sites to get noCD patches to be able to make backups? How come the industry themselves aren’t offering my this as a faithful, paying customer? There is a reason I complete stopped buying games with DRM… They do not supply me with the options I need. This is a digital age – I should be able to handle my product in a digitally flexible manner!

So, instead of pirating games because you don’t want to pay for the honest work of men and women in the gaming inudstry stop playing games. If you want to change the industry start paying for games, but only those that do it right!

If companies, like EA, doesn’t listen to you then… well… they’ll find out in the one language that company can understand – MONEY!

EA : Lost contact with the real world?

Posted by DarkJedi – October 15, 2008

After perhaps the most criticized game launch in history with Spore EA has been fighting with a PR nightmare their blinded analysts could never have foreseen. EA that for once are bringing a quality game line up, including “Dead Space” and “Mirror’s Edge” are now faced with a group of fans that feel betrayed by the company. They are angry that pirates get a far better deal on the versions of the games that can be found on the internet – and I am not talking about the price.

Most gamers spend several thousand dollars on their gaming rigs and they are not about to let control of that expensive pierce of hardware in the hands of EA’s runaway DRM-software.

The problem is that EA is no longer a game company, but just a publishing house filled with blinded analysts living in a world which is divided up into only two groups of people: Loyal Customers who apparently buy every EA game and countless expansion pack or the evil pirates who would never pay a dime for a game. It’s right up there with a certain american president’s dividing of the world into good and evil.

Every stupid comment from EA these days seems to be bridging the gap between this lost company and their former loyal fans. I, for one, own more than 30 original EA titles and that is not going to change… No, I’m not going pirate even though EA wants you to think that! I’m just dropping EA from my shopping options just like I dropped every music CD out there with DRM…

Let me know when EA becomes a gaming company and returns to reality again….

Spreading the Viral Spore?

Posted by DarkJedi – September 9, 2008

Well, it was highly awaited… Finally some innovation in the world of gaming – not just another FPS with slightly better graphics and even crappier gameplay!

Then EA decided to screw both the good developers at Maxis and their by-now-small percentage of faithfull customers… and so they did!

This game is not something you buy – it is something you rent for 3 goes and that’s it! Naturally it also fills your computer with what can only be described as a full-on rootkit. So if you have been trying to avoid virusses, trojan and other backdoors in your system for years now forget about ever buying an EA game… What reign of madness did ever get the idea that a game is of such worth that it requires to take over your computer, which represents a value at least 25 times as much?!

If only one could buy the pirate version which works without all these problems?!

So in short: Don’t buy this unless you want to pay for the most expensive rental game ever made (trust me: the game itself is certainly not worth it by a long shot) and naturally for those money you also get a full-on rootkit placed in your system forever and ever!

Get lost, EA!

Greedy Business ™ : Throwing bad numbers around

Posted by DarkJedi – April 27, 2008

When the music CEO’s are lining up to claim that “The times are changing” they are all wrong. The times has already changed, the entire eco-system around the music and movie industry is already in the new times and has been for a long while. The new generation are frantically leaving the old format in the dust, choosing instead the digital alternative and this development is going fast. Meanwhile the Greedy Business ™ is still acting like we were in the times of old, fighting to put one non-userfriendly DRM out after the other – everyone of them broken before ever entering the market… This attempt to control their customer and the customer’s needs and uses are failing miserably and often ends up in publicity scandals that can never be amended after the fiasco has gone public, like the example of Apple’s latest Quicktime DRM that ended up ruining your entire system, while trying to lock you into a single vendor. Just imagine for a second that any other industry tried to lock a consumer into a single vendor? They would be judged by the court and forced out of the free market immediately!

After a decade of darkness in the minds of the Greedy Business ™ ’s CEOs they finally started to realize that calling your customers pirates, suing your customers while at the same time locking their systems full of DRM might not be the best way to win their hearts. Then Apple along with EMI launched DRM-free MP3 music on iTunes and suddenly Amazon followed with the two more of the Big Greedy Four. All that was left was Sony, who still couldn’t believe why the others would ever want to abandon DRM. After pressure when every blog and newssite on the planet had written about the DRM-free campaign from the other three Sony decided to make their own “DRM-free” option. However, true to Sony’s way of handling their customers it was an extremely poor and difficult way to implement DRM-free, which forced you into a physical store, thereby removing half the incentative. Why would Sony ever want to implement it in such a horrible way? The answer is simple: It is the only way to “prove” that DRM-free doesn’t work. If their silly “DRM-free” attempt was a fiasco they could go out and claim that people didn’t want DRM-free and that the Big Greedy Four should go back to DRM – ensuring Sony a good deal in royalties for their tons of non-functional DRM-schemes.

The main problem the Greedy Business ™ is now left with is their legacy from this decade of DRM and customer-hating. Many analysts predicts that DRM especially will haunt the Greedy Business ™ for a long time. Meanwhile the Greedy Business ™ continues to sue its customers, however meeting a lot more resistance now! The problem with companies like RIAA/MPAA is that their only interest is to make the customers of the company that pay them look criminal – how did anyone ever expect a business model like that to work? EMI has already seen the problem in this constellation and are asking RIAA what it is getting for its annual 250 million dollars, while being prepared to leave the RIAA should their response not fit the bill! RIAA is in dire straits already for showing sides that the music industry shouldn’t like too much. RIAA itself is for some reason not ready to pay artists anything even though they claim to this in their behalf – nor do they ever expect to do this… Why should anyone pay them then? Why not pay directly to the artist that has been exposed to piracy? At the same time they are eager to stay in control in their role as gate keepers and constantly battles individual and independent artists to keep them and the Big Greedy Four in control of the entire music industry, which is also something that would never be allowed in any real free market. Their public announcement often creates hate among music customers and clearly shows that they haven’t got the slightest basic understanding of how a free market should work or what their customers want – or even what they are actually doing!

What is more of a problem is the fact that these “organizations” react so differently which has become painfully obvious in the many lawsuits against college students in America these recent years. The approaches and understandings of RIAA, MPAA and the TV-series are so different you wouldn’t think they even know what they really want – apart from more money. When their lawsuits hits prime news sites like Businessweek with a story of a poor mother who is innocent and who fights back against the Evil Empire ™ of RIAA and the cursed music industry it is a PR nightmare from day one. Of course with their lawsuit approach they are sure to create hate towards the entire industry from the next-generation consumers, which shows their understanding of business. How could the CEOs of the industry miss this? They are once again left with a PR nightmare, which they leave to their owners to clean up, while they still claim their annual wages for ruining the future market for their owners.

If they instead started to look at statistics – instead of “inventing” them – they might see that pirates sometimes actually help companies sell more products… A concept no CEO in the Greedy Business ™ would ever come to understand with their 1980′ies way of thinking. They haven’t even reached Web 1.0, while the rest of the world is ready to leave Web 2.0 and go forth.

What strikes me as particularly inconsistent is how RIAA for example handles its money. They claim to be doing this on behalf of the artists, who pay them quite handsomely to do this horrid job. On the other hand RIAA wants to use a method of pay themselves they refused to the webcasters, while at the same time doesn’t actually go out and support the song writers who is claimed to be their first priority. The RIAA is suppose to be the best lawyers the Big Greedy Four can get, but why are their methods then called into serious question? The same methods are called into question when it comes to the BSA, who are actually forcing companies to turn away from the software-producers who pay the BSA and turn to open source solutions – loosing them for the long run! A company like MediaSentry also quickly removes the earlier proof that they were using illegal methods from their homepage showing that all these companies are breaking the law to “uphold” what they consider to be a righteous cause! All in all these companies are no better than the mafia – and until the Greedy Business ™ understands that they customers will continue to hate them – continuing this PR nightmare!
These days are interesting days. Especially when a hacker found his way into the Media Defenders company and proved that companies like RIAA knows that their actions have zero effect on piracy. This is interesting as it proves that the RIAA isn’t actually working on the side of its employer, but rather is trying to stack up money for themselves while laying to their employer. And what would the BSA do when they see companies like Sony caught pirating software themselves? Sony are refusing to make amends, even though they have forced thousands to do this in a similar situation. How come they only respect copyrights and patents when it helps their own cause?

What are they even doing in the courts? The obvious have absolutely no sense of how to act as a lawyer or how to prove their desperate cases, clearly proven when the RIAA “expert” witness was deemed “borderline incompetent” by real experts in the courtroom, while all their “proving” techniques was called into serious question as well… Why do the Greedy Business ™ hire these guys and pay them so much money for being incompetent? They expect nothing in return, do no real statistics or analysis and still expect customers to buy from them after being sued!

When they cannot win in the markets or in the courtrooms what do they do then? Well the obvious answer if you lived in the 1940′ies Germany or in China today would be to secure a law that indoctrinates the next generation about their view and their view ONLY on file-sharing – ignoring all technological progress made the last two decades all together at the same time. Thank god I live in the real world … and not a country where a new law can make it possible to demand 1,5 million dollars per copied CD – even though no physical pierce has yet to be stolen and all evidence can be falsified digitally! Naturally such a law is made while a large company like Wal-Markt goes out saying that they will no longer accept the far too high prices on CDs as they are experiencing that neither will the customer! Of course a good CEO would know such a thing – if they didn’t read the statistics of companies like MPAA, which are at least a factor of 3 exaggerated and so are those from the college piracy numbers, which they have already admitted!

The grotesque part in this is that even though they are lying wildly and they admits it the CEO’s do nothing. They do not act on this, like a normal CEO would – and therefore they are lost in the digital race completely! The companies are offering no real alternative to piracy. Even the dumbest CEO should know his numbers so well that when he sees that the two biggest piracy nations of the world, China and Russia, bring down their piracy numbers and it doesn’t affect the CD or DVD sales, which continues to fall that this is not a major contributing factor! What a good CEO would do then is to find the REAL contributing factor – instead of relying on statistics that has already been proven false from day one! An industry led by so poor leadership is doomed to fail – and they will… sooner than those poor CEOs will ever realize!

Vista : A Long Way From Home

Posted by DarkJedi – March 4, 2008

No one would ever forsee the great problems that Microsoft have created for themselves with the release of the long-delayed Windows Vista only a few years back. The hardware companies were preparing for massive sales, Microsoft was claimed victory yet again beforehand and everyone listened to the weekly spin from Microsoft on the great upcoming Vista. When the product finally was released, however, the story became quite a different one…

It quickly became apparent that despite of a much longer implementation period than usual the quality of Vista was very untested and it was found to be quite a limited product in many ways not expected, like for example simple file copying which can still cause memory problems – something never experienced before in a Windows system. The system was also a giant memory hog, crawing a large machine and hardware needs that was largely unexpected. Combined with extremely poor driver support from hardware vendors this has had the effect that the Vista is very unpopular in the business market. Among the professionals in the industry the support for Vista is clear: 90% doesn’t want Vista! The enterprise has acted harshly against Microsoft and persists on getting downgrades instead of buying Vista. Even when it comes to Microsoft’s own bosses and managers it is obvious that they doesn’t like or want their own product and its hazzle and performance issues as well… Peculiar isn’t it? When so many bosses agree that the product is not ready why didn’t they react and give the developers and hardware vendors more time? It is already been considered among many in the enterprise to skip Vista completely and wait out for the next version of Windows that is scheduled for 2009/2010, which would give Microsoft a seriously long period of financial income trouble!

Microsoft has already reacted in many ways to the poor acceptance of Vista. They have lowered the prices for a relatively new product quite fast, which was obvious since Vista is priced far too high for its value and still is. They have also allowed for a downgrade program among retailers so that people can still get Windows XP – a five year old version they prefer over Vista. Meanwhile the performance problems of Vista is displayed to the public when Windows XP already run circles around it currently and are about to get a significant boost with the upcoming Service Pack 3. So much for closing the performance gap… And that’s not even Windows XP’s best feature compared to Vista – Compability is, however! Vista is simply a nightmare in terms of program and driver compability at the frustration of its users.

To put it frankly Vista is the worst public image nightmare Microsoft has ever spawned – The biggest blunder Microsoft ever made! Customers are mad and feels deceited and are even suggesting that they should be offered Windows XP free (which might in a way actually be a clever strategy for Microsoft since they would feel good value and be tempted to try Vista every time they become annoyed in XP). Microsoft’s PR nightmare can be seen around the world, where for example C|Net has put on the top ten of worst technologies ever released, or hear the many reactions to Vista, which say beyond any doubt that this is a major issue for Microsoft. It hasn’t made things easier for Microsoft that they also fails with DRM and screw their customers in the middle of this uproar. What is even more ridiculous is that Microsoft with Vista has tried to keep the pirates out even more drastically, meaning more trouble for the few people who actually buy Vista, like for example a simple driver update can cause a reduced mode and require re-activation in Vista. For the paying customers it is simple: WGA needs to go!

It is a publicity nightmare that just keeps on expanding, the lost image is getting harder to recover for each day in this facade. Steve Ballmer has to feel the pressure at the moment and should seriously consider resigning. His first major release as head of Microsoft shows a company in dire straits, with no sense of quality or timing or pricing and ends up loosing an enormous part of the enterprise and core business market. Microsoft needs to remember that Vista is not just Vista. With this great failure the entire eco system around Windows is troubled – meaning trouble for important business partners, hardware-vendors and especially Microsoft’s other products, while playing perfectly into the hands of their competitors. Microsoft simply lost sight of value for money and quality. A clear example of the new low at Microsoft is that they have even lost their regression tests, which led to a human-error messing up Windows Update completely for all customers – how can that happen with a professional company like Microsoft with their experience?

There are many suggestions to what Microsoft can do to get out of their Vista problems. Personally I think Steve Ballmer expects everything to pick up nicely when Service Pack 1 is released, but he is about to get disappointed. When the first companies that tries to adapt Vista after SP1 is ready and they fail because Vista is still too far from production quality and those stories hit the net it will be down-graded business as usual for Vista and Microsoft. The many broken promises of Vista has let focus slip onto the alternatives for a while. Mac OS X is getting massive publicity – combined with the popularity of iTunes and especially the iPhone. Linux is also getting focus again as it can suddenly provide a great value for money on current hardware and are in many ways better for business than Vista. The wolves are gathering and they are chipping away at Microsoft’s business model on more than one front. Microsoft’s profitable Office is also getting attacked. While Microsoft is left with a quality assurance problem, a marketing nightmare, a strengthened set of competitors Linux on the other hand is still doing what Microsoft was famous for many years ago, which is innovating…

What can Microsoft do? Well, first of they need Steve “Throwing Chairs” Ballmer to pack his chairs and leave. Then they need to get their quality assurance back in place. Then they should start innovating again. Cut away the overweight slow performer that is Vista and make a proper operating system. Get back into the leading seat and embrace change and standards and show the world and your competitors that you can compete on equal terms – not just because of your de facto monopoly. Set the customers in focus for once. Lower the price much further for Vista – and perhaps offer a driver garantie so that people don’t get frustrated with their first time with Vista. Get the drivers to market and ensure their quality. Get the application support back in focus. Add some real value to Vista, like for example WinFS, better integration, innovation… And for gods sake make more efficient code – enough bloat has gone into this thing already… Cut away the bloat, optimize it and you might even end up adding real value for your customers.

Follow-up: Lack of Games for Windows good for Linux?

Posted by DarkJedi – February 17, 2008

While Microsoft singlehandedly choose to abandon that platform they are earning all their cash on when it comes to gaming because of their failure with Vista and especially DirectX 10 others are not ready to put PC gaming into its grave. A PC Gaming alliance has been formed – mostly by hardware producers who earn a lot on hardcore gamers, who always buys the cutting edge of hardware again and again – which is started to preserve the PC as a viable gaming platform.

What astonishes me in all this debate on PC Gaming versus Console gaming is the three facts that everyone, including the game producers, seems to have forgotten:

  1. A lot of games are played best with mouse and keyboard, e.g. First-persons shooters (which is by far the most popular genre) and strategy games.
  2. What about the modding community? Have the producers forgotten how to keep an ancient game like Half-Life selling more than 14 years after it was published because of fans with spare time that keeps making great mods that adds free play-hours for their game, without them having to invest in it – only enjoy the increased sales over time?
  3. Sometimes you don’t want to play your games in the large LCD TV in the living room, but rather on your computer in a room by yourself or on your laptop while traveling by train.

Now we hear publishers like Epic coming out saying that they will shift their focus to consoles… Well, consoles may very well have a better starting sale, but what about the overall lifetime sales? The console market is a fast shifting one – If your game is a AAA game you would have spent a lot of money developing it and marketing it, but if it fails to draw attention at first you will only end up lowering your prices on the game and perhaps over time break even. If it were published on the PC, however, you might see the game suddenly going back in focus with a good-gameplay mod holding up the sales, like Epic has seen with almost all their Unreal Tournament games. They practically lived off the modding community! And now they are turning their backs to them – well, good luck with that! That is exactly what happens when you make a one-sided contract with Microsoft, who only has two things it wants out of a contract:

  1. To boost the XBox’s game selection compared to Sony’s PlayStation 3…
  2. To boost the appalling Vista sales by the promise of “beautiful, optimal” gaming on DirectX 10, which has already been shown to be the worst move Microsoft has made yet.

So naturally Epic has gotten a lot of cash from Microsoft for making “Gears of War” an XBox 360-only and then a “Vista”-only in terms of full graphics. The funny thing is that XP is fully capable of displaying it as beautiful as the Vista version, but Microsoft forced Epic to disable some graphical options on XP so that people would want to buy the crappy Vista. Naturally those restrictions could be avoided :)

So in the end we find that game publishers really doesn’t care about the many fans they have on the PC gaming platform – they care for Microsoft’s money and their first month sales… All I can say is: Go out and find a game on a console that has earned more money than that of “World of Warcraft” or “Half-Life”…

Greedy Business ™ : Money & Control – Part Three

Posted by DarkJedi – January 5, 2008

In this part we take a look at the technologies that the Greedy Business ™ brought into this world and what have happened to them. Then we are going to discuss the future of the Greedy Business ™. In terms of technologies I am of course thinking of Digital Rights Management or DRM, which was an idea for keeping control of exactly what people did on their computers. First of the idea was introduced as a way of ensuring themselves against piracy. Naturally it didn’t affect piracy the least, or it can be argued that it did in fact even do the opposite. Pirates suddenly offered goods that were far higher quality for the consumer than what the Greedy Business ™ did. When the Greedy Business ™ discovered that their technologies didn’t work they found a different usage for this particular type of technology. Suddenly it was suppose to enforce the rights of the content owners, limiting how people used their computers, and then it quickly became a question of time before the Greedy Business ™ saw it fit to sell the rights you previously had for free now for a large fee. That meant that you no longer could make copies to yourself, in example for your car or on your portable music player, and they even went as far as to claiming that it was now illegal to do so. However, technology was not something that the Greedy Business ™ had any comptence at and their futile attempt at has always gone horribly wrong. In a matter of days or often even before released those technologies were already overruled. An example of their complete incompetence in this field can be seen in a recent case from the MPAA, where they released a toolkit to monitor everything on the universities. This toolkit was not only illegal software to use for the MPAA, but also allowed everyone from the outside to see anything inside the universities – a major security hole. They simply lack a complete understanding of the world of IT and could be outmanuevred by a nine year old in most fields of expertise here.

What they completely failed to understand was that DRM in fact had an impact – it was just a negative one. One example is the PC gaming market, which is slowly being killed by DRM technologies. So what the Greedy Business ™ is actually doing with their technology is ruining their future markets and offering an ideal situation for the pirates. Why they couldn’t see this is beyond my understanding. My guess is that they simply wasn’t ready to accept that their old way of distributing, which has not seen change in more than 25-30 years, was threatened and they needed to renew. This is seen clearly in the way the Greedy Business ™ have handled every new attempt at a renewed digital distribution model, which they have been extremely efficient at overtaxing and overlicensing.

While they were busy shooting down every alternative they got and kept throwing bad technologies that took basic rights from the digital consumer it soon became apparent to everyone but the Greedy Business ™ that this might backfire big time. You can’t expect consumers to keep buying your products when you are screwing their rights, their computers, their products and then suing them all the time… Most people would understand that! Of course what you would do if you lived in Nazi germany in the 1940′ies and had such a situation is to create your own news and create fake facts wrapped in propaganda, so that is exactly what the Greedy Business ™ are doing. The funny thing about this propaganda campaign, that is suppose to take the heat out of the consumer backlash, is that it actually admits that the RIAA and the entire music business is not giving the consumer what it wants.

Meanwhile the loathing of DRM continues around the world. Still it is only at the consumer level. Governments doesn’t understand the problem. They can’t see why DRM will never work, as their understanding of IT and technology in general is as fair behind as the Greedy Business ™ are, which means that governments in general buy the crap that the Greedy Business ™ are saying. Even after the complete fiasco of Sony’s rootkit, with another one on the way, they still allow themselves to be taking around the bush by the Greedy Business ™’s lobbyist. Of course you cannot expect every educated human to be as stupid as most politicians and therefore IFPI’s sad attempt at trying to extort the universities into teaching only the view of IFPI is going horribly wrong. They somehow can’t see the problem of making this non factual propaganda in schools as a problem – maybe we should send the entire Greedy Business ™ to China and let them see what the outcome of onesided brainwash is? And it is not the only place where they try to push their incorrect perception of the world and their propaganda into. Report after report, filled with incorrect statistics and erranous analysis on the “losses” caused by piracy comes out of the Greedy Business ™ press month after month.

As of late though an entirely different problem is hitting the Greedy Business ™. The musicians, whom they represent, have had enough of suing their own fans and incapacitated fan’s computers with badly made DRM. Sir Paul McCartney has already spoken up, talked about the many problems that the industry is facing and how they acted completely wrong, when faced with such challenges. You can even hear rock stars claiming that the fight against piracy was already lost in 1997, but they are still fighting it like it was 1997 and with that use of DRM they will just create enemies for themselves. With the artificial high prices customers are forced to pay for inferior products, filled with DRM, they will turn to piracy. Especially since pirates have understood how to make it available and easy to get – even for people who are not technic minded. The band, NiN, also agrees that the prices of CDs are simply too high and that people should pirate their songs! This is a bold statement, but there is a hint of truth in it. Compare the investments in making a full motion film to that of making a CD album. There are far many more people involved in the film and it takes far longer, requires far more equipment, and still the price of the two products are almost the same, when comparing a CD with a DVD – why? While it may be a bold statement by NiN Radiohead took it a step further and went public with their latest album without a record label and even let their fans decide what they wanted to pay for the album! Claims are that Radiohead has already earned around 6-10 million dollars on this distribution model – and they don’t have to share it with a thousand and one lobbyist, lawyer or boss at the Greedy Business ™.

Well, why don’t the big four then start to sell music without DRM? According to some stores DRM-free music outsells the protected tunes in a ratio of four to one… Fear, I guess! It took a company in trouble to see the light… EMI, when faced with dire economical problems and no buyer, needed to get a foothold in this new reality. Suddenly they began to understand that the future is digital and depending on CD sales will ultimately fail. Out of the blue comes the initiative… Suddenly Apple is offering DRM-free tunes on iTunes – rocking the boat again – together with EMI. This suddenly gives EMI an amazing sales boost on iTunes – even on old songs. Amazon cannot lets this go by and soon after signs a deal with EMI, where they want to offer high-quality, DRM-free music. Suddenly Walmart enters this arena as well and now the game is on!

Sony BMG is still sitting behind like a stone, refusing to see reality, like they always have. They are still wingshot at the fact that Apple did with ease what they failed at miserably in retail. Their latest attempt at digital distribution with Crackle is way beyond embarrassing and clearly shows why Sony will never become a software-centric company.

Meanwhile the writings continue on the wall with CD sales continuing to decline and digital music sales continue to rise! This causes the Greedy Business ™ to try and blow an ember of life into their dying goldchild, the CD, but this desperate last attempt already looks like a failure on all counts. What Apple and EMI has begun on iTunes with DRM-free music is already starting to have an affect on the big four… DRM is threatened!

Suddenly Universal shocks by not renewing their iTunes contract, but only to test an alternative way of distributing DRM-free tunes without Apple in charge. The real reason they wanted to leave Apple and iTunes behind is that their greed got the best of them. They wanted a cut of every iPod sold… It is not called the Greedy Business ™ for nothing! They just want higher prices and more money – the only reason they went for DRM-free! The chief of Universal shows just how greedy they have become…

In the meantime the CEO of Warner Brothers suddenl and might I add FINALLY, realizes that their anti-consumer campaign might have helped P2P networks and hurt their own business. Welcome back, sleepy head! This is the first step towards DRM-free tunes from Warner Brothers, and it doesn’t take long before they also went the same way as EMI, leaving Sony as the last of the big four to stay behind on the DRM-only wagon!

After being the last company in the universe to see the light Sony BMG finally yields to pressure and goes DRM-free as well. With Sony into the fields of DRM-free tunes the future for DRM in terms of music is suddenly looking bleak. This could mean that Apple will finally have to relinguish some of their power in the digital music distribution domain, which they have controlled with ease and DRM. I don’t know if the big four made their move out of their deeply burried holes too late, but time will tell..

Of course this is only in the music business – the problem of DRM is still a heavy issue in terms of movie and films, where embarassing moments such as this clearly shows why the amateurishness of DRM needs to go on all fronts! They may not realise it yet, but the writing on the wall is clear. DRM is loosing the battle…

What to expect from the future then? Well, the business could start by looking at what is done right for once. Take a look at what function piracy really fulfills, like using it for giving away free samples, which is a cheap altenative to hyping and expensive marketing! The change is coming, and those that aren’t going with it will die! The business needs to go back and treat customers like customers and do like EMI has done – leave the RIAA/IFPI and start offering people what they want instead! DRM will be gone, perhaps already next summer for music… Now what digitial distribution model will be chosen is too early to say, but it needs to be nurtured, not overtaxed or overlicensed. This will be the salvation for the music business and later the movie and game business… The sooner the companies embrace this change and the future we live in the better they will survive. Times will be difficult – the transition will be hard – but listen to your customers and you will survive! In order to earn money in the future you need to release your control…

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