Apple's Strategy Re: Palladium

[Chaszmyr]

There has been all this talk of rumors with Apple releasing Marklar (OSX for x86) or AMD Hammer-equipped Macs when Microsoft's Palladium hits the market because consumers will be dissatisfied with Microsoft.

How likely is this really?
It sounds all well and good to techies like us who are upset about Palladium, but the average consumer probably won't even know Palladium exists... Much less use it as a reason to buy a new computer or learn a new operating system. So Apple might win over some techies, Its not a very large share of the market that they would be capturing, and therefore isnt something that would cause Apple to do something as drastic as Marklar... Unless Apple had other reasons up their sleeve too.

 

[ewinemiller]

seems unlikely for me

If I undertand the issue and folk's concerns correctly, there are a couple of things that make it seem unlikely to me that there will be some massive groundswell of outrage at Palladium that will cause the world to dump MS and go to OSX and Linux.

My first thought is that if it all goes through, the content providers (music and movie companies) are going to be releasing content with copy protection. If the only OS that is enabled to use that content, no matter how restrictive the use, is Windows, you're not going to see people jumping to other OSs just on the principle of the thing. "Gee, you can buy this wonderfull Mac over here to rip and burn CDs, but you can't do it with any CD released in the last 2 1/2 years because the music companies use a copy protection that Apple refuses to work with."

Second thought is MS understands what their customer wants. The have no interest in making sure that you can't rip that CD, only that you pay for copy of Windows and Office, and that they can advertise that you can rip and listen to a CD. I believe I saw a news story the other day that MS, and a few other big names in the PC were trying to get the entertainment industry to be a little less restrictive with the use of content so I'm pretty sure it won't be nearly as bad as the doom and gloom croud will have you believe. There article is here

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7026

 

[Chaszmyr]

Re: seems unlikely for me

Originally posted by ewinemiller
The have no interest in making sure that you can't rip that CD, only that you pay for copy of Windows and Office, and that they can advertise that you can rip and listen to a CD.

Its not just that you can't rip your own CDs... People want to be able to continue downloading tons of music off the internet that they dont own. Yes: Its illegal, but people want to do it, and Palladium wont let them.