A new Business Week article, Daggers Drawn Over DVDs, has gotten a lot of publicity for its melodramatic description of a supposed shouting match between Bill Gates and Sony CEO Howard Stringer. Typically, our entertainment-obsessed journalists buried the story. After you get past the catfight, you read this:
Microsoft and Intel paint a futuristic picture of the digital home, with sleek PCs powered by their software and chips in the central role. The PC would shuttle music, photos, and video from room to room—and grab off the Web everything from the latest Tom Cruise blockbuster to a National Public Radio podcast.
Sony and its supporters are skittish about the latest movies being zipped around the house. Blu-ray disks can hold more content than today’s DVDs, but they would be used in much the same way. The new disks would be plopped into a DVD player, and copyrighted material, like Hollywood movies, couldn’t be ripped to a computer’s hard drive without a studio’s permission.
Neither world sounds perfect, but of the two competing visions, I want the one that gives me more options, not fewer.