Re: Future BBC Online Services

MJ Ray wrote:
<mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Steve Firth <%steve%@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...] If the BBC had been staffed by similar idiots in the 1960s then colour TV would only have worked for the owners of GEC Televisions.
Shudders at the memory of having to repair GEC televisions from the
sixties. But if they'd done that then GEC might still be in business and
there might still be a UK electronics industry :)

Transposing that to now: why the heck is the BBC protecting the US
software industry? :-/

Difficult to say, I suspect policy is being lead by those responsible for supporting the systems, and it's getting dressed up as a management led policy because managers always like to feel that (X) was their idea.

Once the decision is made, all announcements about the fact tend to become justifcation of the Way Things Are and Why We Must Not Change.

The content providers will also have their say, and they are notoriously protective and will prefer to choose an option which makes a clearly defined, large organisation responsible for rights management. Linux does not appeal to them, they can't understand the model and there's no one individual to pin down and force to pay license fees for the right to create a viewer for content. Apple never appeals to the suits.

FWIW, I thought the writing was on the wall when Blair invited Gates or when Gates invited himself to No. 10, a few weeks after Labour rose to power. It's fairly obvious some deal was done at the time. Up until that visit civil service policy had involved a level of diversification of operating systems. The security people were particularly keen on it with several papers showing that a diversity of operating systems assists resilience and resistance to penetration by would-be hackers. That policy rapidly turned around and NT/2000/XP became the norm for the civil service.

The BBC tends to get some spillover in attitude and decisions from the civil service, possibly because there is (some) mobility between the two. Certainly for a time, every civil servant I knew was leaving to go work for the BBC, although mostly at Radio 3 where presumably the time passes as slowly as it does in Whitehall.
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