In all its efforts to corner the market in next generation digital distribution, Redmond's own Microsoft seems to have possibly choked its new flagship Windows Vista too much with copyright protection. In a recent article submitted by Peter Gutmann, a medical imaging specialist, the author argues that Microsoft has made its newest OS far too cumbersome for the mass market and will eventually lead to the demise of its own DRM practices. Mr. Gutmann states that the way in which Microsoft has locked down Vista in hopes to keep copyright infringement of the latest HD-DVD and Blu-Ray technologies to a minimum will only succeed in forcing users to buy faster hardware to cope with the degraded performance of Vista. Vista has proven to be a fast OS, when its spec'd with the latest and greatest hardware, but to the average consumer, it proves to be far too bulky of an interface to run even as efficient as the version its replacing (Windows XP). Gutmann states that the Vista Content Protection specs could "very well constitute the longest suicide note in history". He further goes on to say that the efforts to force users into faster hardware to cope with the security of Vista will have a detrimental effect on the PC market as a whole; both hardware and software.
Gutmann sites an example in his paper which can be found here that, "Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server)".
Gutmann's final argument states that crafty hackers will find ways around Microsoft's security efforts just as easy as any other OS they've released and will ultimately end in doomed efforts, annoyed customers and more expensive, less functional operating systems.
