From today's Globe&Mail, Bill Gates adds "way" to his name:
Gates aims to be digital content king: Microsoft chairman, in CES keynote speech, sees his company as an all-purpose gateway.
The monopoly in OS and office software is insufficient. Gates now greedily wants to control the flow of all things digital. It would appear that the Gatesian dream has changed from "information at your fingertips" to "information through my fingertips." He is no longer satisfied with providing tools that let us acccess information more easily; the world's richest man now schemes to determine which information we will be permitted to see, and how -- and then charge us each time.
The mysterious Microsoft employee, Mini-soft, has a different dream from the Gates 1984-style nightmare:
I think a positive-because-it's-so-negative result of Zune is that it added fire to the DRM [digital rights management; aka copy protection] debate, and whether we [Microsoft] should start regretting how much of a DRM darling we've become.
Only if all information is DRM'ed can Gate hope to become the controlling gateway. But we have hope: there are indications that 2007 is the year that DRM begins its death spiral.
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