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It's like the two bete noirs of Microsoft: activation and predatory licensing. Activation on the macro scale is like crack addiction in the cash flow timeline, you have to keep having more, harder and stronger. At first it kills off the underbelly of your market, taking out the soft option purchasers who migrate from stolen to legitimate. So in order to enforce better volumes, you ensure even tougher activation. Slowly the alienation sets in among power user communities, which is addressed by even more stringent hostility towards those purchasing power users. It's a self reinforcing downward spiral, driven ultimately by shareholder earnings, a kind of inverted Ponzi scheme killing off tomorrow's revenues to fix the hole in today's.

Licensing is even more toxic over the long haul. It spikes early revenues in the first two years but after that the 60% who didn't buy in, sit on their existing systems for far longer than they otherwise would. This has the effect of slewing the Windows deployment base, as older installs persist longer than they otherwise would: delaying that crucial upgrade in the developer skill base, as old skills remain viable far longer; making the burn factor of switching to Linux increasingly less onerous over time, as the burn factor of upgrading within Windows grows worse the father back the legacy deployment becomes.

What you're seeing happening in today's major vendors and producers is the after-blast following overly optimistic financing by precisely the same entities that blovated these large concerns in the first place at the cost of supplier diversity. And thereby driving what is felt to be 'a reality' from the investors' perspective, into the industry. Thing is, that 'reality' IS killing off the goose, the gander, the homestead and the ranch, and it's A Good Thing, dinosaurs are always at their biggest just before the extinction. Whoever would have believed in the decline of IBM before it happened?

The question is: do we really need Intel, Microsoft, Dell, HP-Compaq and all the other hegemons that have so badly distorted the computing market? Hell no. What is currently passing itself off as R&D is not any kind of attempt to bring real value or genuine innovation to the end consumer, simply an attempt to create some of kind of novel market that can sustain the scale and the cash cows created during the bubble. Innovation requires an unconstrained marketplace in which newness can compete with oldness; in a market with no supplier diversity, innovation cannot compete with legacy - this again was proven by IBM's incapability of allowing the early PC to compete with its mainframe market.

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