NO MORE FREE LUNCH

There has been a bit of a commotion lately surrounding Windows 8.

The word from Microsoft is that Windows 8 will not play DVDs – unless you buy an upgrade. What? Pay more just to play DVDs on your PC??

Microsoft explains that royalty fees have to be paid for DVD playback software. So they want to make DVD playback a separate purchase, and thereby reduce the number of royalty payments made.

Estimates are that OEMs have to pay about $3 in royalty fees for every copy of Windows that supports DVD Playback. $2 of that is for the MPEG-2 DVD decoder – even if the PC has no DVD drive!

A number of people consider a half-billion dollars to be chump change for Microsoft. Perhaps it is. It also would be no problem for Microsoft to add $5 to the price of Windows to cover the royalty payments.

However, is it right for the MPEG-2 group to exploit the royalty payment system, to acquire 100’s of millions of dollars for something that cannot be used? I don’t think so! Consider that Windows 8 will be installed on numerous Notebooks and Tablets and Smartphones that will never have a DVD drive. The MPEG-2 group would be getting paid big bucks for nothing.

Also realize that if your Windows 7 PC came with a DVD drive and PowerDVD, your purchase price financed two royalty payments (once for Windows and again for the PowerDVD program)! That’s called double-dipping in my book.

So, in a way, I’m glad to hear of Microsoft’s decision not to bundle DVD playback with Windows 8. It is time the ‘free lunch’ program being exploited by the MPEG-2 group was terminated. It means they won’t be receiving roughly a billion dollars from us over the life cycle of Windows 8 – for nothing.