All must watch this, even if you are bandwidth-impaired like old Womblebottom.
Personally I dont understand how they plan on surviving. What I dont want I dont buy, and the insinuation that I dont have a choice in the matter is redicilous. I decide what I want to buy.
I would say to everybody. We are currently in the golden age of personal computing. DRM is still not a major problem, media can still be backed up, you can still decide what to have on your machine. You can still manage your own music, yes at the moment there is very little on your machine you don’t have control over. Of course, this kind of control isn’t good for business. I would be surprised if in 20 years we still saw the kind of liberties we have today. Yes you can decide what you buy, but it isnt you they are thinking of, but the uneducated millions who wont understand what they are losing properly. You can decide what you buy, yes, but they still decide what they make.
They cannot make something they cannot sell. Me and you, we decide what we want. They do not. I’ll buy a good reasonably priced product if it does something I want. But they cannot simply decide that “hey now we will only produce solitare games and make billions” because people do not want it.
Saying it isnt me they are thinking of is also a strange way of thinking. We are all “me’s”, we are not mindless drones (okay we probably all know one or two who is ;)) that just goes about and is content with buying a CD that doesnt work in our car stereo, for example. If it doesnt work we get angry, and we demand our money back.
If our computers constantly tells us that “you cannot install that, yak yak yak” we get angry and demand our money back. If we find our internet activities are monitored, we get angry and go to court.
The customer is always right.
Sure, but what I am saying is that I am not that sure if the majority of users will complain enough to make it not worth there while. Trusted computing is only worth it for them if they will make more money from having it (ie reduced piracy possibly, secure selling point to new users) than they will lose from people refusing to buy there products. My guess is that if they make it so that trusted computing is the only real option for inexperianced users then they will buy it anyway. It is like saying if you in the desert, and you have no water, if I offer you a bottle of warmish water for $100, and you have $100 on you, you may well buy the water because you are so desperate. You can choose not to buy it, but it does not stop it from being the only thing for sale, because anouther man will just come along and buy it. Of course there will allways be those fit enough to survive without the water for long enough to find a new source, but for the majority they would just buy the water anyway. I would only lower the price and sell fresher water if nobody was buying it and I was losing money.
Kinda confusing example, but its the best I could think of at this time of night.
The summary… the unknowing masses, & uncaring business users (swayed with “benefits” of TC hardware/software) will provide an ample market for Trusted Computing crippled machines.
The knowing minority will find alternative uncrippled hardware/software, as several manufacturers will always be willing to tap this niche market,as it’s isn’t particularly small either.
The thing is that mainstream media like video on demand, next gen dvd´s, “legal” music download etc will only be available in drm formats and possibly some software and games too. And it will not be possible to watch/use it on your “untrusted” (well you may trust it, but they don’t, atleast they don’t trust you, they probably don’t like you either) hardware/os. So if you can live with linux/other “untrusted” 
os and no movies/music/games after circa 2008 it wont affect you. But if you want new entertainment you’re screwed. DRM schemes might be cracked, for a while then there will be something more powerful to replace them, then they are cracked again and replaced. The only way for consumers to stop this is to stop buying DRM crippled MEDIA, all this security and protection costs microsoft and the hardware makers lots of money and they would be happy to never have implemented it. But the entertainment industry will not release new content unless they do and content is what the users (yep that’s you and me) wants.
