When a lot of people look back on the computer industry andwonder how it was we got to where we are, where one company dominates so muchof the landscape. They can often talk about what happened in the court systemin terms of antitrust. But one of the reasons that Microsoft is so popular isbecause of what they call the ecosystem. You have developers, you have thesoftware they are developing and then you also have the consumers of thatsoftware. Now, when developers develop software for a particular platform,consumers will buy that software and then when they buy that software, thatencourages developers to keep developing software for that platform and itbecomes a vicious circle.
So now let's take out the software from this bubble andlet's add multimedia content. We have pretty much the same thing when it comesto audio and video out there. For example, there are competing technologiesover platforms. There is QuickTime and there is Windows Media Player and thereis Real, and there is Flash. All these different technologies, all differenttargets that developers can use to go after different audiences with theircontent. But if you're a developer, then which of these are you going to pick?You are going to pick the one with the biggest target because you want to reachthe biggest audience in hopes of selling the most amount of your stuff. Well,the biggest target right now is still the Microsoft world because the Windowsthat are running on all these different computers and because of Pocket PCrunning on all these different devices. You have computers. You have Pocket PCsand PDAs with little screens on them. You also have cell phones, flip phones,all running this Microsoft technology and all able to learn Windows Media technology.So if you are a developer, that's really where you are going to go firstbecause you are going to go to this big mass market. Well, if you go to thatbig mass market, then the vicious circle starts all over again.
Consumers say, "Well, I want the best content,"and it happens to be on these platforms, so events of happening is when theybuy those platforms, it encourages developers to develop more content for themand then when that happens regardless of what company is involved, which technology,one company ends up dominating. We call that a monoculture and it gets us intothe sort of the same situation that we are in today where one company sort ofcontrols everything we do and there is a danger involved in that.
Now these other companies, like Apple and Real and Flash,Macromedia is the company that makes Flash, they are all trying to figure outhow to nose their way into this ecosystem. But the people who are really incharge are you, the consumer. You are the people who have to decide how you'regoing to offset any future monocultures. You have to make choices. You can'tlet one proprietary media format, for example, one that is designed strictlyfor QuickTime or strictly for Windows dominate. That is why MP3 is so popularand that is why MPEG4 is so popular.
And if you think that Windows Media isn't going to go reallymobile on all these devices, you have another thing coming. Ultimately, this isthe backdoor to another big domination scheme called Digital Rights Management.We are already seeing a lot of controversy now about Apple's Digital RightsManagement technology. It does not matter which one of these we pick. One ofthem is going to end up dominating the Digital Rights Management scene and thenwhat that leads to is a domination of content creators such as Hollywood.
