Ravi Pandya
ravi@iecommerce.com
www.iecommerce.com
+1 425 417 4180
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ABOUT ME
Ravi Pandya
Architect
Cloud Computing Futures
Microsoft
ravip at microsoft.com
| 03- | Microsoft |
| 00-02 | Covalent |
| 97-00 | EverythingOffice |
| 96-97 | Jango |
| 93-96 | NetManage |
| 89-93 | Xanadu |
| 88-89 | Hypercube |
| 84,85 | Xerox PARC |
| 83-89 | University of Toronto, Math |
| 86-87 | George Brown College, Dance |
| 95- | Foresight Institute |
| 97- | Institute for Molecular Manufacturing |
DISCLAIMER
The opinions expressed here are purely my own, and do not reflect
the policy of my employer.
Tue 14 Sep 2004
Tim Bray weighs in on "The DRM Debacle". I agree with most of what he says about the content industry - usability, distribution, and pricing will make more of a difference than DRM. Focusing solely on piracy leads them to ignore important business issues. Supermarkets with self-serve checkouts undoubtedly lose profits to shrinkage (their euphemism for shoplifting), but the increased customer satisfaction and reduced operating costs more than make up for it. The grocery industry may be unexciting and run on razor-thin margins, but they do know their business.
He also complains that you can't open Microsoft Office 11 RM protected files in OpenOffice. On Windows at least, that's simply a matter of programming - the formats and APIs are available in our SDKs. For other platforms, there would be a lot more code to write, and there are some technical limitations in the protocols and trust model (which we're working on removing, since our enterprise customers want to be in control of their own information). And of course, due to the unfortunate Patent Office policy on software, a non-Windows implementation would also need to license the related IP.
08:00 #
© 2002-2004 Ravi Pandya | All Rights Reserved