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Today's state of the art software and hardware becomes tomorrow's junk or, at best, a curiosity.

However, do we really need to be living on the bleeding edge and will vendors find it hard to sell the next generation of PCs and their operating system?

I have a feeling that they might find the task a little harder than they're anticipating, for one reason:

Digital Rights Management (DRM).

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Huge amounts of time, effort and money are presently being poured into making our next generation of computing equipment and software loaded with DRM.

This, we are told, is to protect us from viruses, worms, trojans etc., and to protect copyright holders from the illegal duplication and distribution of their property.

Ultimately however, it means a significant restriction on what you can and can't do with the PC and programmes you've bought and paid for -- will consumers be ready to accept that?

Using today's technology it's quite practical (albeit technically illegal) to make a safety backup of your favourite music CD or rip it to your MP3 player without too much difficulty.

Likewise, you can even duplicate your favourite DVDs so that the kids can have their own copies rather than risk scratching or losing the original disks.

Upgrading to a new computer?

Apart from MS Windows, most software will simply allow you to reinstall it on the new platform and keep on using it without extra charge and it's even legal to do so -- providing you erase the copy on that old PC.

Well I'm sorry but this kind of freedom will be little more than a memory once hard DRM becomes an intrinsic part of the next generation of hardware and software.

Music CDs will be a thing of the past, replaced by higher density audio formats (on plastic or downloaded) with hard encryption that is bound to specific devices. The same goes for the type of video material that's presently found on DVDs.

Virtually all commercial software will likewise be bound to your PC, meaning an expensive upgrade of your applications if you want to move to another machine.

But what's all this new-generation stuff going to give us in return for these restrictions?

Better quality video and audio?

Well I'm old and neither my eyes nor ears would probably notice the difference so I don't care.

Better quality software?

Hell, software developers are already scraping the bottom of the barrel to find new "features" to add to most of our standard applications (how many of MS Word's features have you never used?).

Okay, if you're a keen gamer or regularly buy the latest music/movie releases then you'll have little option but to buy into DRM-laden hardware/software but, for the rest of us, I think today's hardware and software will do very nicely for quite some time.

I guess that's not what vendors want to hear though, is it?

Will *you* be buying into the next generation of DRM-burdened hardware and software or will you be happy to keep using what you've got for as long as you can?

Will integrated hard DRM have an adverse effect on the sales of the next generation hardware and software?

Tell us all and see what others have to say in The Aardvark Forums

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