Microsoft Vista's #1 Hater

According to this guy's cost analysis, not only is Vista going to screw you, the person who purchased the software, it's also going to doom Microsoft itself and quite possibly the computing universe as we have come to know it. Particularly, he's got issues with the Visa Content Protection specification of which he says in the Executive Executive summary of his paper "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history." Nerds will be able to parse the fact that a content protection specification has to do with DRM. Normal people might need to be told that DRM has to do with copy-protection and that kind of thing. Bill Gates himself isn't so high on DRM these days, despite the fact that he's about to stake Microsoft on an operating system that holds digital rights as one of its core truths. In December he told a blogger that the best way to ensure that your music is legal and playable is to rip CDs yourself. We'll see if that holds true under Vista.

Anyway, how does this guy hate Vista? Let us count the ways: "Disabling of Functionality," "Indirect Disabling of Functionality," "Decreased Playback Quality," "Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support," "Elimination of Unified Drivers," "Denial-of-Service via Driver/Device Revocation," "Decreased System Reliability," "Increased Hardware Costs," "Increased Cost due to Requirement to License Unnecessary Third-party IP," "Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption," and "Unnecessary Device Resource Consumption." That's a lot of ways. If any of those ring a bell you might want to go read the paper.

Here's a clip from his final thoughts, complete with Star Wars reference:

The sheer obnoxiousness of Vista's content protection may end up being the biggest incentive to piracy yet created. Even without overt "piracy" (meaning bypassing restrictions in order to play legally-purchased media), it makes very sound business sense for companies to produce hardware that bypasses the problem, just as they have already with region-free play-anything DVD players. Perhaps Hollywood should heed the advice given in one of their most famous productions: "The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers".

While we're vaguely on the subject of Microsoft, we never acknowledged Todd Bishop's awesome keyword analysis of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates's big speeches from earlier this week.