What Bill Gates would like.

If I owned Mickeysoft stock today I'd be selling it.  Here's Gates' vision of the future:

The Microsoft tycoon believes homes will soon have a single, remote device to control all their "digital lifestyle" and entertainment needs.

Films would be as easy to download from the Net as music is now, he told a technology conference.

CDs and DVDs would be the last physical format for music and films and they would one day be streamed straight to computer hard drives, the billionaire suggested.

TV shows will also be broadcast online, giving viewers more choice and the ability to customise what they watch. For example, football fans who want to see match highlights but have only 12 minutes to do so will be able to get their chosen clips edited instantly into a 12-minute programme.

I think Bill would very much like for this to happen, but in a world of 200 gig Ipods, 10 gig DVD burners, thumb drives and pretty soon much digitally larger and physically smaller storage mediums, there's no way in hell.

Bill and the movie/tv/music biz would very much like for there to be a central, secure distribution server where they can pipe out their content in uncrackable encryption, so that we the doofus public must pay for every frame and note.  They don't want to rely on advertisers, they want to make the whole world a movie theater where everybody who watches has to buy a ticket.  The studio making King Kong is spending 200+ million samoleans, they don't want to be wondering if they are going to see any of that back.  Its a top-down hierarchical control structure with maximum enforceability for the movie owner.  You don't pay, you don't play.

Unfortunately it isn't going to survive reality, because there's a world full of cheap processing and storage and transmission bandwidth that will crack anything they come up with in a week.  Example, DVDs of Starwars III have been on sale for a dollar in China since before the movie opened.  Dubbed into Chinese too. 

The fact that Gates is still pushing this indicates he ain't with the program.  His lunch is going to get eaten just like he ate IBM's back in the 1980's.

Sell that Mickeysoft stock.

The Sellin' Phantom