OSNews

The CD was invented collaboratively. Why not a single successor to DVD? Now we get stupid crap like Paramount going HD-DVD only and screwing over every single BluRay owner (including Sony's PS3), for what is essentially the exact same content and quality. This is an anti-competitive action brought about by the presence of competition in the first place.

If there was a single standard agreed on for HD content, then we wouldn't be having this stupid game of charades and trying to justify that the expensive BluRay player people have bought, is not in fact junk.

There shouldn't have to be a BluRay / HD-DVD battle in the first place! Having a Winner of a pointless war proves nothing what so ever.

> This is an anti-competitive action brought about by the presence of competition in the first place.

Very true. The problem with competition is that we are simply not in the eighties anymore (and even back then, we weren't in the seventies anymore :-P). The IT industry has converted from being a field ran by engineers to one ran by businessmen, who run it like they run fast food restaurants: once you get an edge over your competitors, you need to keep it and kill them off. The clients are only the means of achieving domination.

Basically, there's no guarantee that any of the companies will keep a fair competition, and this is the problem I see with competition in IT. The problem is that IT is a domain that still has a huge way to progress. Unfair competition in the market of fizzy drinks can't do any harm to buyers. Unfair competition in IT has already set us back several years, in at least a couple of important sectors (usability, WWW etc.)

competition on the same standard is diferent than competing standards.

Competition is always good, the problem here is that competing standards create a difficult time till one wins.

Think IE. It got no competition, so no updates in 6 years.

Now FF is the competition, and sudenly we have IE7.

"""

"""

I'd hardly say "suddenly". It took a long time to get development rolling again, since IE had been dormant for so long.

The keystone cops style fiasco of Mozilla, from initial Netscape source code release, through the hugely unpopular Mozilla Suite, to its emergence as the relatively (though still marginally) successful Firefox, is probably outside the scope of this thread.

But in the end, yes, FF has, through competition, benefited users of both browsers, as well as those of other browsers.

The free market... and competition... work. Albeit sometimes on an excruciatingly long time scale. It's a slow process anyway. And there are so many ways for the more powerful entities to game the system.

But in the end, the gaming... the cheats... end up doing nothing but buying time. And the abusing party has to actually get back to reality and compete.

Competition is great, but there has to be a way to allow competing technologies to interact. Especially in the case of Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD, where the competiton has gone beyond improving upon a technology and has, instead, split the market... You are right, that one will emerge and it will be vastly better (we hope anyways), but in the mean time the consumer is getting thrown for a loop

WTF ?

REAL Competition is good... look at the recent pay offs to HDDVD...

If it wasn't for the backhanding, lobbying and Sony having its mitts in an entrenched media market we may not have had this issue to begin with!!

Fair competition is ALWAYS good

and to add... the only reason DRM exists is because the technology still exists

The media and publishing cartels have wanted their hands on consumers rights for hundreds of years (look at libraries) but its only NOW that technology can prevent what a user does with his second hand books and media AFTER they have read/watched them.

Yep, that's what I thought, too.

To me it seems there are two kinds of competition:
competition of products and competition of formats/standards.

The first is obviously good as we can see by the IE example.
If somebody creates a competing product, say, a nicer web browser or DVD player, etc, I cannot see the harm.

It is only when different companies try to dominate the market by pushing their own, incompatible and often closed "standards" that competition becomes harmful.

This is what has happened with IE-only sites or Documents in some closed formats:
You are locked into using one application because the data is not stored in an open format or (in the case of IE-only sites) uses behavior of IE that is not part of an open standard. Another example are DVD or video formats.

I think a good comparison (don't be afraid, no cars ahead ;-)) are railways:
You can have competing companies, using different kinds of trains and having different schedules and prices but the basic, underlying infrastructure has to be standardized. It does not make sense for every company to use a different, incompatible railway type.

Formats/standards/infrastructure is, imo, one of the few areas where competition and free market lead to suboptimal results.
The reason is that competition works best on a level playing field. By allowing competition on data formats and standards you basically allow the players to change the playing field and the outcome will very likely be tilted in favor of whoever puts most money in pushing his own "standard".

It's a cycle. You get competition, and one wins, then you get stagnation, and then it starts over again. Nobody really wins in this cycle. It feels like good is happening, but that's just the cycle of movement.

If there was no competition, Microsoft would have supported the standards in IE because they wanted too. There wouldn't be a reason to exclude standards for anti-competitive actions et al.

I don't agree with your point, Kroc. In the PC hardware market, there are lots of competing companies. You predict that stagnation is the inevitable consequence of competition. Yet, the hardware market features a steady pace of innovation and new development.

As someone else pointed out, MS went years without developing IE. They kept improving their product when they had competition and resumed improvements when substantial competition reemerged.

If it weren't for desktop Linux and the Mac, I'm sure that we would still be running Windows 95, at best.

Who knows how far things would have developed in terms of operating systems and software if MS had been kept under control and forced to operate within the law?

You seem to repeatedly state a principle that competition leads inevitably to stagnation but there are many perfectly healthy technology markets in which competition is fierce and development is healthy. PC hardware and mobile phones would be two obvious examples.

What motive would a single producer of VHS videos and cassettes have to develop a successor if it were not for competition? Same argument goes for a single producer of 286 PCs.

The reason for the stagnation was the goal of the company involved.

Microsoft created IE to BEAT Netscape, not for the user to browse the web. As such when its goal was complete it didnt need to do anything else.

Competition is a good thing only if the GOAL is good

"Greed is why consumers have to choose between HD-DVD and BluRay; HD DVD would be alone if Sony didn't have a history of wanting to make more money pushing their special systems with their restrictive licenses."

That's moronic and delusional. Do you think out of all the players involved in these two competing formats, it's just Sony that is doing wrong?

Ever heard of Microsoft? They have a like of prioprietary that would make even Sony blush. And for every Sony format, there is one or more other formats - all proprietary! Reality check indeed.

Greed is why consumers have to choose between HD-DVD and BluRay; HD DVD would be alone if Sony didn't have a history of wanting to make more money pushing their special systems with their restrictive licenses.

Sony isn't the bad guy here. They created Blu-Ray from scratch, trying to create the best format. The end result was different enough from DVD that it was more cost effective to build new factories than to try to modify the existing factories to make Blu-Ray discs.

A few companies didn't like that, and decided to sacrifice disc capacity to create a format that could be manufactured with minimal changes to the existing factories.

Now, the complications. People aren't in any rush to move to HD, partly due to the slow uptake of HD in general, and partly due to the format confusion. Demand for normal DVDs is going up, so the manufacturers have to make new factories anyway, which presumably are being built with the ability to make any of the 3 types of disc, greatly reducing the advantage of HD-DVD.

"Greed is why DRM exists. Some companies believe strong control over their content is the best way to sell more content because they can prevent sharing."

Good point. I hear MSFT's DRM schemes built into Vista defended because "they are just what they have to as the production companies mandated the DRM" - that's nonsense because a)MSFT invented WM DRM in the first place and b)MSFT owns and promotes HD-DVD.

So it's not HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, its MSFT vs. Sony.

Don't believe either one of their smoke and mirror acts.

"So maybe we could say that there are sane competitions and bad competitions? Any comments about this? "

Agree completely. The car is the perfect reason to point out good competition. Japanese and European cars forced features into the American public that American manufacturers were forced to match if they wanted to keep business. If you got fed up with your car, the barrier to move to another car was low. Therefore, the consumer won.

Competition like BluRay vs HD DVD can hurt the consumer. The productions are fairly close to equivalent, at least to the point where the average consumer isn't going to notice. But choosing a format and investing in it could hurt the consumer 5 years down the road. There's a huge barrier to change in this technology once you've entered. It leads to people either getting burned years down the line when standards have been set, or a slow adoption rate (leading to consumers using dated technology).

There are times when competition is absolutely necessary. There are also times when standards are necessary to protect the consumer. I don't think these two need to be mutually exclusive.

DRM is an anti-competitive measure created by the presence of competition. If companies worked together with no intention of trying to screw the other over, then DRM would not so much as pass anybody's mind.

I wasn't saying one thing; then another. The first line was simply paraphrasing what other's say that competition does, and then me providing alternative views on those items.

DRM is only to prevent competition between unpurchased (ie pirated) copies and purchased copies: it doesn't itself do a darn thing for competition between other producers, but only (at least in theory) protects the producers of something that uses DRM from being screwed by pirated copies of their works.

Where you came up with the concept that DRM was brought about by competition appears to be a red herring at best.

I think the author was implying that consumer goods are made to be disposable. They are produced cheaply, so it is more convenient to dispose of them rather then fix them.

I guess it depends on how one looks at the situation, or the situation one is in. On one hand that cheap washing opens the washing machine market to people who previously couldn't afford a washing machine, and on the other hand, it's a cheap washing machine that gets replaced when it breaks and the buyer still comes out ahead.

To that argument I say, just buy more expensive stuff. You'll be more inclined to fix it rather then throw it out. There are premium brands out there, they're just not sold at Wal-Mart.

"Moreover, competition is exactly why DRM will fail in the end. What properly informed fellow will buy encumbered/copy-protected technologies when given a [u]choice[/u]?"

That will be the people that like to purchase CD's/DVD's from the music/video store and listen/watch them. DRM itself is strictly driven by the music/movie industries. This only questions whether it will fail or not, as people will continue to buy the media which uses DRM, so will require a way to use the media.

Beat ya by a fraction of a second. Ha!

But. Exactly. The argument starts out with a mistaken analogy that invalidates the argument...

"""

"""

How do you know you beat me and that it was not just an artifact of the process scheduler implementation?

Oh, if *only* we had listened to Con, *I* might have beaten *you*! ;-)

Edited 2007-08-30 13:55

Hmm, I was a child then, and as I recall my parents bought the Japanese cars not because they were more expensive, but because they were less expensive and more reliable than both American and European cars. My parents moved from a "new" Chevy which was sold with a wheel that was falling apart (and which was taken in twice for service, who found nothing wrong until my father finally looked at the wheel and saw that a brake pin was falling out) to an Audi Fox whose engine wouldn't run reliably at all (my father's description: "the only thing classy about that car was the price"), to a Plymouth Arrow which was just a rebadged Mitsubishi model. We kept the Arrow for more than ten years, and experienced only occasional, minor problems.

The American car companies have long been hung up on the notion that a car is an expression of a person's style. They were so enthralled by this idea during the 60s and 70s that they did only the minimal amount of engineering necessary to make it run until the warranty expired. The dealer sold first-time buyers a relatively cheap piece of junk called a Chevy or a Ford, and when they came back with more disposable income tried to sell them up to a higher class car ("the car you deserve!"), until they ended up with a Lincoln or an Oldsmobile. Those were junk, too, but marketing imbued them with a classy feel, and the higher price earned a higher profit margin.

This is more or less what the American companies still try to do, but Japanese competition spanked them so badly during the 80s that they started engineering again...until they discovered SUVs, and then they went through one of those "bigger is better" phases that finally gave us the Hummer.

This is all off the top of my head, and is probably wrong, but I'm quite sure that the Japanese models were not more expensive than the American ones.

"""
Hmm, I was a child then, and as I recall my parents bought the Japanese cars not because they were more expensive, but because they were less expensive and more reliable than both American and European cars.
"""

Early on that may have been true. Back when "Nissans" were called Datsuns" they may have been less expensive, as well. That changed in the 80's. Quality has its costs. ;-)

The lowered quality of US automobiles existed in the late 60's. But it didn't really get going until the 70's. My 1968 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham has served me quite well over these last 40 years.

Because, competition increased the complexity of operating systems. *shakes fist at sky*

If we wouldn't have had competition, operating systems would have stayed at 1984 levels for ever, and we would still be using the more reliable sneakernet rather then this new fangled, untrustworthy Ethernet thing-a-ma-bob.

DOS boots really quickly too, but I wouldn't want to use that as my primary OS. The better example would be QNX, I think. I remember it being super streamlined and quick.

Windows won the competition, that market stagnated, and now new competition is fighting back.

It's nice that an Amiga booted in seconds, but we're not all using Amiga's now, despite being superior technology. Competition killed the better technologies in the name of the company who could be the most ruthless, not best.

As others have pointed out, this should not be an argument against competition. Instead it is proof that competition is needed. Seeing as Windows won the competition, there was no longer any competition in the market hence it stagnated.

Isn't it ironic that open standards are guilty of Microsoft's success?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible

This is kinda silly because my experience with Amiga is classical example why non-diversity lost. Amiga might been superior in same area of technology, but it was also expensive, had quality issue and suffered bad decision of company. Amiga simply lost because it couldn't meet the demands of people and couldn't lean down the costs. Business wanted something that Amiga couldn't offer, cheap and choices. Nazis had superior tanks against Russians but they still lost because what war needed was cheap and good enough tank. Overall whole article is confusing, you should read history and study financing before you go make this kind silly articles.

your post made me crack up. Thanks I needed that.

I was hoping it would give someone a laugh.

I totally disagree. A culture of 'Milk the public for every penny and tell the artists, off of whom you are already milking the profits of they're produce, a load of bull to get them on your side.'

Basically, a culture of greed and high profit margins kept artificially high by a dieing industry unable to change it's business model for fear of losing all that 'hard earned' cash.

Also, considering the fact that the recording industry, DRMs biggest proponents, is almost completely controlled by only four corporations, I'd say it another case of not enough competition.

As NoFX put, Dinosaurs will die.

No, a culture that says "I'll help my neighbor if it isn't too inconvenient" created DRM. It goes against human nature to horde something that isn't scarce. Sharing is a survival instinct. When I have food, I'll share it with my neighbor so that he shares his when I'm starving. The big business doesn't want us to help each other. A starving customer will pay any price (on credit, of course).

It's funny you use the word "culture". If the content industry remains on its evolutionary track, soon we won't have any discernable culture left to speak of. We'll just be worker drones that make the minimum payment on our credit cards every month. We'll have all sorts of new and fascinating social disorders. We'll worry about raising our children in a cynical, uncaring world ruled by self-righteous social Darwinists.

It's interesting that American dystopian literature is almost exclusively based around big bad government and its authoritarian social planning. We don't have to worry about that. When social planning comes to America, it will come wrapped in content and carrying ads. It's big bad media and its corporate sponsors that want to control society. Government is just there as a decoy, a dog-and-pony show to distract us from our real problems.

Competition is good. There's nothing like a handful of similarly-sized businesses vigorously competing for our dollars. But underregulated capitalism doesn't result in fair competition. It results in small and new companies having a huge disadvantage in competing with large and established companies. It also results in "competitors" forming industry alliances to fix prices and gain leverage over consumers and governments.

Don't get me wrong, America couldn't have grown to become a superpower without unbridled capitalism. But here we are, with our ridiculous per-capita GDP, and we still have an economic system tuned for explosive growth and consolidation of power. We can't keep it up any longer. We're drowning in debt.

We're not creating wealth anymore. We're just pushing it upward, and it's not trickling back down. The American economy has flatlined, running straight into a wall of finite consumer spending power. If we don't purge the beast in a controlled redistribution program, we're going to erupt, and the pus of a rotting superpower will rain down on the rest of the world.

We're drowning. If big business won't listen and our government is spineless, then we have to save ourselves by saving each other. It's the only way.

A starving customer will pay any price (on credit, of course).

And here is where the key fallacy lies. You will not starve just because the Big Mean Corporation won't let you have the Bon Jovi: Yet More Remixed Oldies album for free. If they were harming you, then you might have a point, but they are not.

People have no right to other people's things. If I walked into your house and helped myself to your money, I would become a criminal; the piracy of music, video, books, and software is no different.

Oh, I completely realize that people will live without Bon Jovi. But they have to have it anyway. That's the problem with our consumer culture. We've been suckered into "needing" things we don't really need. We'd rather be in debt than not have all the shiny stuff we see on TV.

No, I wouldn't want you coming into my house and stealing my money. But someone I knew a bit better asked nicely, I might lend them some money. Digital content is weird because we can make copies at little or no cost. If I could turn my $20 bill into as many $20 bills as I like, then I would certainly lend you money. You can hold me to that, OK?

As I've said many times before, digital media is different than anything we've bought and sold before. How it is monetized will be one of defining issues of our time. The ability to make infinite copies is a unique property. It flies in the face of supply and demand. It's a new kind of entity that's neither a good nor a service.

Comparisons to stealing cars or or even stealing network bandwidth are flawed. These are scarce commodities. Digital media is not. So there is a difference.

"""
Comparisons to stealing cars or or even stealing network bandwidth are flawed. These are scarce commodities. Digital media is not. So there is a difference.
"""

Agreed. And yet intellectual property is still property, as well it should be (despite Stallman's well meaning hand waving about that term). On the supply side it is, anyway. Someone worked hard, spent sleepless nights, etc., to come up with the idea and develop it into a reality. Or to compose and record it. Whatever.

We have a newish beast here. But we persist in trying to define it as a car, a horse, or as the air we breathe. When it is, in fact, all three, and none of the above.

It looks like one thing to the producer. Another to the distributor. And quite another to the consumer.

It's the sort of thing that the original Twilight Zone could have done some interesting things with, had the writers been shown a glimpse of this future.

This is the sanest of any thought I have seen so far. DRM is a reaction, good or bad, to a culture that simply no longer wanted to pay for anything. I really do not see the difference between when a store puts security measures in place to insure you do not walk out without paying for their product and a company that wishes to insure that you pay for their product.

One of the most baseless claims is that the music industry just did not understand technology and the ability to download music. What was at issue was people using P2P networks to download gigabytes of music they did not pay for. There is no argument that the methods they have used have been in poor taste to say the least, but the fact remains nobody is entitled to free music anymore than they are entitled to free movies.

As much as people whine, complain, bitch and moan about DRM, I have yet to hear one single REASONABLE alternative. One argument that could, and is made, is if the industries lowered their prices maybe their would be no need for DRM. Except, that basic economics would tell you that they have no reason to lower prices, the markets have spoken and people ARE willing to pay $20 for a DVD, $2 for a song, etc..

I am sorry but I really just can not get all worked up about this. If your downloaded Transformers or 300 HD DVD will not play at full HD on your Vista PC, well remember the old saying.."You get what you pay for!"

Exactly. All this demonstrates is that raw capitalism may not always produce the optimal solution, as some idealists believe it does. Therefore we have regulation of the markets, for example, the ISO standards. Economics 101, as I believe they say in America.

Er, no.
Since when was working together a sin? If that's what capitalism dictates, then I suppose I am.

I totally agree about the whole lack of a clue part. Competition in a free market is why capitalism works, and the lack of competition, or any other real incentive to create, is why communism fails, and at this point I believe there are more then enough examples from history to prove that to be true.

With DRM though, we really differ. There are two things really, DRM the idea, and current DRM implementations.

<soap box>

There has been this massive dis-information campeign going on for a few years to get the idea that DRM = evil into peoples heads. This is just as wrong as the RIAAs campeign to get Copying = Stealing as the widely accepted truth.

There is nothing wrong with DRM as an idea, in fact it is downright nessicary in a world where people cannot be trusted. Where it gets wrong is when companies start implementing dracionion measures that screw their customers.

What is wrong with asking to input a 15 character key to get the full version of software? I don't think anyone has a problem with it, in fact it is this model that has lead to alot of great software being made, and lowers the barrier of entry for a programmer to make a small business. However, compare that to MS activation. Same idea, different implementation. One is simple, yet nessicary. The other goes beyond all realm of reason.

We'll go on to movies. Sure, there was alot of evility going on with CSS, but in a general way it didn't inconvenience the vast majority of us. AACSS on the other hand, is absolutely insane. For DVDs, buying a 20$ dvd player is all that was required. For HD-DVDs, you need a new tv, new sound system, and new player, and if any of these do not meet the HD specs, then you end up with degraded content.

It is not evil to want to protect something you sell in a form as easy to copy as digital media is. Any time you walk into a store, chances are there are cameras on you. There are metal detectors. Do you care? no. Because this is a reasonable level of protection, and as long as you aren't trying to steal, it in no way inconveniences you. If the store detained everyone for strip searches before leaving the premisis, that would be another story.

At a certain point, they have to accept that there will always be people who will steal, and to try to protect against everything will only end up hurting your paying customers. As consumers, we need to vote with our dollars and show them what we will tolerate, and what we won't. Buying the media, and cracking the protection does absolutely nothing. Boycotting anything that in your eyes goes too far, does.

</soap box>

I have no problem with your comments on DRM and the way that the patent system is abused, but do you have any sources to prove that Gateway uses or has used remanufactured