I'm still not sure what fault this is of Vista's, apart from Microsoft playing in the same pond everyone else in the industry is playing in.
Don't misunderstand us, this isn't a glowing-fan-boy-rendition of Vista-love. It's just that it's pretty obvious to us the situation regarding high definition content and so called premium content and the delivery mechanism involved are an industry wide issue. The author's less than clear implications (if you focus solely on the headline of his article) seem to be overwhelmingly pointing towards how content protection systems themselves are ultimately a detriment to all involved, and if that's the case, we wholeheartedly agree. The focus however does tend to drift away from a purely "let's look at the consumer" standpoint, to one only software and hardware engineers directly involved in the industries (or ones with too much evangelical free time on their hands) would even care about.
These are problems endemic to the industry as a whole, and ones that obviously rankles his (and admittedly our) purist views of how things should be. Regardless, in our opinion, focusing on Vista, even though much of the article actually didn't focus on Vista solely, sort of misses the larger point, and leads us to wonder "why the headline?" We simply assert that Vista's content protection mechanisms are merely a symptom of an industry gone haywire as a result of genuine fear as well as greed, and not the root cause of anything that wasn't already painfully wrong to start with.
