HP Decides On Anti-Consumer Strategy

Overhype

from the looking-a-bit-deeper dept

While most of the focus on HP today comes from the HPod/iPod announcement, there were a few other interesting stories. I’ve been hearing from folks at CES that Carly Fiorina’s keynote was a doozy, in that it lined up supporters from the music industry who spent all their time bashing kids downloading music. Reports are now coming out talking about HP’s anti-consumer rights stance on these things. Once again, all of these features do not make things better for consumers – they just make things worse. At the same time, it will do nothing to slow down real piracy – as those folks will just get around the copy protection. So, what we’re left with is an offering that is less friendly to consumers, more costly to HP (and, therefore, consumers), and does nothing to help anyone. The other “word from the floor” we heard at CES is that HP employees in the same room as the keynote even agreed that this policy was bad news, and were upset that their employer had decided to go with such an anti-consumer stance. Meanwhile, Tristan Lewis writes in to point out that the bigger news, buried in HP’s announcements today is about their Lightscribe offering, which will let DVD and CD burners silkscreen images directly onto the CD. While I’m not sure I agree with Tristan’s assessment that this is a bigger story than the iPod deal, it is a cool idea. Update: As pointed out in the comments, Tristan’s description goes a bit further than the actual product: it doesn’t actually do silkscreening, but creates “silkscreen quality labels”.