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"Digital Jaunt" DOES Illustrate Microsoft's DRM problems
Uh-oh! Microsoft Techies among Victims of Draconian E-Book DRM

Hey, different perspectives make for a good group blog, no? A few points in reply in an earlier post on my TeleRead item:

(1) Whether or not outsourcing happened, this still would seem to be a very bad reflection on the usability of Microsoft e-book technology. And why was the outsourcing needed in the first place? The Microsoft employee himself mentioned the headaches of DRM as a possiblity. Microsoft's DRM is among the worst, especially from a library perspective. It's no small coincidence why OverDrive, despite its relationship with Microsoft, prefers Mobipocket and even Adobe in its library program. The fact that Microsoft library users must cope with different readers, of course, aggravates the problem. See Point #3's reference to the need for a standard e-book format for consumers--something about which Microsoft itself was once quite clueful.

(2) Granted, employees don't always enjoy the best service, but even allowing for that, the usability level of the library seems an utter disgrace. The hassles of Microsoft technology must have just worsened the mess.

(3) The statement about Fictionwise ("has shown that it takes the same time to buy a book whether it is protected by DRM or not") is a bit of a generalization. Fictionwise carries many formats beyond Microsoft. If experiences at other stores are characteristic, Microsoft's DRM is far more of a bother for consumers and support staff than, say, Mobipocket. The real solution, of course, remains a user-friendly universal format to reduce consumers' confusion, whether in a DRM context or others. Although I'm not the biggest fan of DRM, I can see the possibility of having it done in a machine-linked manner, just so there's more flexibility than Microsoft offers. No "X number of activations and that's it, buddy!"

(4) Microsoft's products are hardly "first class" all the time--unless the most operative words are "in one way or another." Check out Bloody Sunday at the Washington Post for Internet Explorer and the so-called Google killer. Often people go with Microsoft because of OS-encouraged dependencies, not quality.

posted by David Rothman permanent link