Cringely on Palladium:

Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn’t choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It’s a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love.

I don’t buy into this doomsday scenario for a couple of reasons:

One: The PC market is large, and has enormous inertia. It’s not as easy to get people to upgrade as it was, say, in 1996.
Two: especially after the Hailstorm fiasco, MS knows its ability to push through even a de-facto standard is at an all-time low.

Essentially, industry trust (amusing since there’s a great deal of talk on their part about Trustworthy Computing^(tm) these days) in Microsoft is at such an all-time low that it’ll be a wonder if it can cooperate and work with partners outside its own walled garden (Dell+Intel+NVidia…) in a couple of years. Sure, we have Allchin talking about Microsoft’s new `transparency’ policy, but the doesn’t-play-well-with-others image will have to go before grand, ship-100-million-to-start schemes like Palladium take off. And this is something that Microsoft will have to realize: they can’t do it alone anymore. Sure, they shipped millions of copies of DOS and Windows. But that was at a time when no one else would look at the PC market. It isn’t clear to me that they can pull it off again — with Intel/AMD or without.