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The open PC is dead - start praying, says HD guru

[Man sollte das durchaus ernst nehmen, IMHO. ---AHH]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/17419.html

By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Posted: 07/03/2001 at 20:01 GMT

Apologies in advance if the following mailing list posting ruins your next meal. It ruined ours too, but since we believe in equality of indigestion here, we feel obliged to share it with you.

Hale Landis maintains the ata-atapi.com website, and has been working for open standards for twenty five years. He has been a participant in the ANSI X3/NCITS Technical Committees that developed the ATA and ATA/ATAPI standards since 1990, and works as a consultant and provider of test software.

His chilling, deeply pessimistic view is that the good times are over. The fight for an open hardware platform is very real, and the power has swung from the PC leaders to the entertainment industry. It's a valuable strategic view from the trenches of the T.13 committee, where the fight over copy control mechanisms continues. It was posted to the private T.13 mailing list, and we cite it here with permission.

Missing the BIG picture

I think many of you discussing CPRM and similar things are missing the BIG picture.

[...]

Basically your "general purpose personal computer", aka "home computer", is history. This should not surprise anyone since Microsoft has done everything in its power to convert the home computer into an Internet appliance. And Intel still thinks it can convert home computer into the central house and consumer electronics "control center". But I think both Intel and Microsoft will find they can't fight the entertainment industry either. They too will end up doing anything so they can continue to sell hardware and software to the "home computer" market. But we probably should start talking about the "computer enhanced consumer electronics" market.

[...]

In my opinion if you are someone, like myself, that needs and uses low cost general purpose computers then you should start praying that there will be some hardware vendor left selling such a computer and that you will be able to run some general purpose OS and adequate applications software. And I would say it will be unlikely that such a computer will have an Intel processor or that any of that application software will come from Microsoft. This possible future must be driving product planners at Intel and Microsoft crazy.

[...]

-- Hale Landis

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