opinion - it's all bullshit.
we will have to wait and see what the sociopolitical majority of today's social climate will produce in reaction to all this stuff which is totally up in the air as of now.
Points -
1. i can't see a scenario where windows is the only system, there's a shitload of actual companies with money who are making systems, as well as the open source stuff (which is pretty popular just the same).
2. there's nothing new here, it's all failed propositions with newer, better advertising, packaged in a different box. In this country our prime minister just had to go and call a press conference to say he was no longer going to rely on spindoctoring to further his position, and people immediately said his speech was spindoctoring. Will people accept what they are told to accept just because of advertising?
3. People are pretty bland, and also apathetic. If it works ok for them, they will not change it for fear of breaking it. At the moment, not changing it means allowing somebody else to be in charge of their software. This is a GOOD THING to them as they don't need to know all that 'difficult technical stuff' to work their machine (ie write letters and go on the internet).
4. People do not give a shit if their privacy is compromised so long as they don't see it, and even then they can rationalise it away unless they are losing something of fairly substantial value (because they fear change, see 3.). If some person starts getting tons of spam to an email address that he has not signed up on any lists with, he will not connect it, in most cases, with some program he uses to play videos which incidentally connects to the internet to up/download "certificates" and "playlist information".
Basically we will have to see what happens. My prediction is this regarding all this upcoming bullshit:
Some morons will just love it. A greater proportion of morons will just accept it, while retaining some formless and groundless scepticism. Many normal people will be suspicious of it to the point where they try to learn about the alternatives (either buy a mac or go the hard way), and many will get frustrated and go back to "windows longinthetooth pallaver edition" or whatever, due to no alternative system being as user friendly as MacOSX, a point i address elsewhere. Sadly the people that do give a shit are already using alternative technology. There's no way for them to use Microsoft's (and intel's) products any less than they already do.
The end result: many people will use the new bullshit, it will become a defacto standard, but other defacto standards will emerge, and enough people will not fall for the bullshit as to keep any one thing from becoming a true monopoly, just like every other time something like this has happened in the machines/information technology industry.
[ June 26, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]
