OPEN THOUGHT
Would Microsoft, Nokia please take note
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
A useful government project: A new national Google Maps mashup of the US by the Department of Energy pinpoints every petrol station selling one or more of seven types of alternative fuel for vehicles, complete with driving instructions and other options. Map shows B20 biodiesel and E85 ethanol stations around Denver, Colorado. |
Thomas Friedman may have said that the world is flat, but over the past months, it is clear that Old World companies are trying to make it bumpier while they still can.
Being of a certain age, one of my favourite pastimes is to watch Mobile Suit Gundam in all its incarnations. Perhaps it's something to do with boys and robots and the romantic notion of being a Newtype. When I carried a Microsoft Xbox 360 for my brother from Singapore, one of the games I knew I simply had to play was Dynasty Warriors Gundam or, as called in Japan, Gundam Musou. However, getting the game turned out to be a long and arduous task that spanned half the globe and resulted in Microsoft's cash registers ringing not once, not twice, but thrice, all because of the non-flat world the Evil Empire operates in.
Getting one in Singapore, at least at Funan IT Mall where I got the console, was impossible. Funan has new games, but anything old was hard to find.
Soon after that, I found myself in London for the Gartner Mobile Summit, and picked one up there. Unfortunately, it did not work as the DVD was zoned and thus my Singaporean-Spec console could not read that particular disc.
Interestingly enough, most of the other games I picked up, newer games, were not region-locked, but more on that later. A later trip to Hong Kong, now forewarned with knowledge of region coding on un-modified DVD drives, got me another copy, which worked, only it did so in Chinese and Japanese. Since my knowledge of both languages is severely limited (I can just about swear in both Mandarin and Cantonese when someone bumps into me on a busy street and half knocks me over), that did not work either.
I ran into a senior figure in Microsoft Thailand at this point and told him of my torment. He only shrugged and smiled, and asked that I not get him involved.
So, after consulting my brother, who did not understand my obsession such an old game, he said that I needed an NTSC-J Gundam Musou International Edition disc, but nobody in Thailand stocks it as it was an old game, he explained.
The game may be mediocre and old, but I decided to give it one more try before giving up and buying a Playstation 3, which does not have region locking.
Thankfully, I travel a lot in this job, and on another trip to Hong Kong, I managed to find a shop that sells English-language games, and it had a copy of Gundam Musou International Edition. I also picked up a copy of Crysis to try out the graphics on a new AMD/ATi Radeon 4800 graphics card. Again, like the Xbox, Microsoft has done a very good job of copy protection and a bad job of zoning. All Crysis discs in Thailand are in Thai, which was something none of us were interested in.
So, for the Xbox, Microsoft started off with a rather complicated system. It uses DVD zones (Thailand is Zone 3, for instance), NTSC/PAL and language. So each disc can be zoned in three ways, meaning the chances of getting an English-language, NTSC Zone 3 disc were not high. In the process of getting one, I got a Zone 2 Pal English disc and a Zone 3 NTSC Chinese disc.
Another example is Nokia. When the download menu is invoked in my N95-8 phone, I inadvertently discovered that the downloadable content depends on the country code of the SIM card, even if the download is through Wi-Fi.
Hence, a Singaporean or UK SIM in a Thailand-sourced phone, in Thailand, results in different programs and offers than I would have with a Dtac SIM.
Again, that is a case of forced segmentation, where the flat world would say there was none.
One glaring oversight was when, again in the UK with a 3 SIM card in it (a bona fide UK SIM), I tried to access the Green Room, the UK's version of Nokia Thailand's Independent Artists Club (IAC).
However it spewed out an error page saying that this content is only available in the UK. What they should have said was that this content was only available in the UK with a UK SIM in a UK phone. The list goes on. BBC Podcasts have recently been locked to UK-only IP addresses as has BBC iPlayer. Many of ITV's clips are not available outside of the UK. Nothing that cannot be circumvented very easily, but is circumventing a very, very simple form of protection illegal under the Computer Crime Law? Thai law, unlike many European laws, does not differentiate between effective and ineffective protection.
The silly thing is that by creating these bumps in the flat world, they are only hurting themselves.
Microsoft almost lost me as a customer. Had I not been able to find (my third copy of) Gundam Musou International Edition in NTSC-J Zone 3, I was seriously considering buying a zoneless Playstation 3 just for that game. In all fairness, this was a problem only with early games and most, but not all, recent Xbox 360 games now are zoneless.
One wonders how much ill-will Nokia gained when the first flagship N95 phones in the UK sold by Orange and Vodafone had their VoIP stack removed.
Yes, using buggy, power-hungry VoIP over Wi-Fi is so dangerous to telcos it must be banned. Perhaps it was the same reasoning that led to the latest N78 missing its VoIP stack in Thailand, too.
And the BBC? By banning iPlayer with its easy to use interface and built-in self-destruct DRM timer, they have only forced people to go underground and torrent files that the BBC cannot track or control at all.
The world is flat. It will just take some time for these dinosaurs to realise it and embrace it.
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Next
