In thediscussion threadattached to my most recent news post on the TCPA/Palladium initiative, Ars Centurion quux submitted a link to an absolutely fascinatingPalladium articleat K5. If you don’t read another Palladium article this month, read this one, if only to get a look at the interplay of forces that can work inside a company and an industry to effect the kind of directional shift that Palladium represents. This article is not another call to arms against Palladium or another warning about Palladium’s many dangers, but rather it gives some insight into the dynamics of Palladium from someone who claims to have been an insider at MS when this initiative first started to take shape.
The central thesis of the article is that Palladium is ultimately one prong of MS’s two-pronged response to Sony and the threat to the PC posed by Sony’s PS2. (The other prong is the XBox.) The PS2 was introduced as a home computing and content delivery platform that Sony completely controls: Sony can dictate what content runs on it and how, and it designed the PS2 to shield DVDs and games from unauthorized use. As the author notes, you can play DVDs on the PS2 and you can run Linux on it, but you can’t do both at the same time. When the PS2 is booted into its most secure mode, the mode in which DVDs and games run, Sony has the ability to ensure that only content signed by Sony can be played on the device. (Actually, there’s an important exception to this, which I’ll mention in a moment.) The PS2, then, was designed from the ground up to offer the content industry, an industry in which Sony is a major player, a platform for the “secure” distribution of rights-managed content; and with the addition of a mouse, keyboard, hard drive, and broadband adapter, the PS2 also becomes a network client capable of using online applications and services of the kind that MS would desparately like to sell using .NET. Hence the XBox, and hence Palladium, which is an attempt to make the PC as a platform look more like the XBox and the PS2.
