Palladium: Safe or Security Flaw?. Microsoft's new project could offer virus protection, control over personal information, even spam blocking. Or maybe it's a giant boondoggle. By Paul Boutin. [Wired News]
If people complained so much about the unique ID that Intel wanted to put into the Pentium III, why would anyone think that people will accept the Fritz chip?
Who needs Pallidium? Big software companies need it. Once you have saturated your market, how do you continue to grow your revenues? Well, if you have little competition, you can raise your prices. But that can anger your user base. However, to grow your revenues, you absolutely must get more revenue per user. How do you do that without raising prices? You tinker with the licensing terms and enforcement. You make sure that a user buys your software twice if he wants to run it on his desktop computer and his laptop computer. The problem is, no matter what you do to grow per-user revenues, you make your user base angry. It helps to spin your case by emphasizing the benefit to users: namely better security.
Media companies also need Pallidium. They also need to grow per-consumer revenues. If you are a media company, how do you do that? Well, you make sure that consumers must buy a CD for their home and for their car. You make sure that they can't make a backup copy of a CD, so that they will eventually have to replace the CDs they play the most frequently. And you spin your case by claiming you are fighting illegal distribution over the Internet.
All this discussion gets to what I think is the heart of the matter. User/consumers want to pay less for their computer/entertainment needs over time. They want to reap the benefits of improvements in technology by paying less. So when BigCos take steps to get more per-user revenue, it just makes them all angry.
Posted by Doug Sauder at July 12, 2002 01:54 PM