Microsoft and interoperability
Derek Slater found that Microsoft seems to continue cynically confusing popularity with interoperability, by suggesting that Apple's proprietary DRM is more proprietary than Microsoft's proprietary DRM simply by virtue of being less popular.
There is a way of parsing what Microsoft said that makes this sound a little less cynical. Maybe Microsoft is trying to say that it will license its DRM to device manufacturers for money, whereas Apple won't do that same with its DRM. But it seems that finding this sentiment as the thrust of Microsoft's comments takes more effort. It's more natural to read what Microsoft says as the view that it's appropriate to ask people to use what's popular, and unreasonable to ask people to use what's unpopular.
Microsoft would no doubt hate it if the tables were turned.
I think I've mentioned that there were two things that bothered me when I used Windows XP for a week or two. The first was that a marketing instinct pervaded much of the software on that platform: use this, not that! Install me, not him! Go here! Pay attention to me! Don't uninstall me! Get this unrelated thing! (People often criticize Unix for its "mechanism, not policy" religion and related cultural traditions, but the Windows platform and its software ecosystem seem to have created the very opposite extreme. The most obtrusive messages I saw this week from programs on free platforms were, more or less: (1) If you like this program, you may, but are not required to, help children in Uganda. -- vim. (2) This program was created by a political philosophy. -- GNU Emacs. (3) You can get updates to, or help us develop, this browser. -- Firefox.
The second thing that bothered me when I used XP is more relevant to this entry. The second thing that bothered me was that codecs and viewers were constantly being downloaded automatically. That process was shielding millions of people from the intense politics surrounding the formats in which they receive and transmit data -- from the question of their legality or illegality, whether they are proprietary or not, what terms and restrictions attach to them, to whom they are available and for what purposes, whether they work well, who created them, why, and when, whether they will continue to be available and to whom and from whom, what and whose strategies they are a part of, with what and with whom they interoperate, under what conditions -- all invisibly submerged and putting the world of codecs and formats squarely under the power of marketing. So perhaps the first point did matter. Every XP user has the opportunity (the carefully-arranged luxury) not to care about, and to be thoroughly ignorant of, file formats. What kind of file is that and what does that mean and who benefits? Someone else has arranged to care about all that! (I expect that people sometimes send John Gilmore Word files without even knowing they are Word files.)
I am not sure they can well afford that apathy.
