An excerpt from a blog at: Vista Does Not Suck | PC Pitstop which had an interesting perspective on DRM.
"So the big question is why is Vista worse than XP? This is not the nature of the technology industry. Each year, things get faster and cheaper. Never do things get worse. The reality is that Vista is an entire rewrite of Windows. Rather than building off of their most successful code base of all time (XP), they scrapped it. It all seems wrong. Like Windows ME, you scrap your bad code, not your best code.
So why? Here is my guess. There are two big differences between Vista and XP. The driver model and the video layer. In both cases, these changes were not made to help us, but to control our access to the content we view. Vista has a "feature" called DRM or Digital Rights Management. I think that once Vista is on a critical mass of PC's, Microsoft will be able to cut deals with Hollywood and other content providers to sell and display their content on our PC's. So every time, we watch a movie on our Vista PC, Microsoft makes a buck instead of Blockbuster.
Of course, we have little to no say in this matter, because Microsoft has essentially forced the PC manufacturer's to put Vista on all new PC's. In order for this plan to work, Vista does not have to be better than XP. It just can't suck. So folks, I am happy to inform you that after close to 18 months of use, Vista does not SUCK." July 14, 2008 by chengrob in The Pit Blog
"So the big question is why is Vista worse than XP? This is not the nature of the technology industry. Each year, things get faster and cheaper. Never do things get worse. The reality is that Vista is an entire rewrite of Windows. Rather than building off of their most successful code base of all time (XP), they scrapped it. It all seems wrong. Like Windows ME, you scrap your bad code, not your best code.
So why? Here is my guess. There are two big differences between Vista and XP. The driver model and the video layer. In both cases, these changes were not made to help us, but to control our access to the content we view. Vista has a "feature" called DRM or Digital Rights Management. I think that once Vista is on a critical mass of PC's, Microsoft will be able to cut deals with Hollywood and other content providers to sell and display their content on our PC's. So every time, we watch a movie on our Vista PC, Microsoft makes a buck instead of Blockbuster.
Of course, we have little to no say in this matter, because Microsoft has essentially forced the PC manufacturer's to put Vista on all new PC's. In order for this plan to work, Vista does not have to be better than XP. It just can't suck. So folks, I am happy to inform you that after close to 18 months of use, Vista does not SUCK." July 14, 2008 by chengrob in The Pit Blog