Gservo
27th January 2003, 06:16 PM
On Friday, Microsoft revealed that the company has given up trying to trademark the name Palladium. Microsoft says that the secure computing initiative technologies once called Palladium will now be called the "next-generation secure computing base," which the company feels is a more accurate and mature name.
An unnamed company had apparently applied for a trademark on the term Palladium, and Microsoft didn't want to be seen as strong-arming that company. "We did not want to be in a position of rolling over them," said Mario Juarez, group product manager of Windows Trusted Platform Technologies.
Palladium has been one of Microsoft's most misunderstood technologies, and, as a result, the name had become somewhat tarnished. Critics decried Palladium as a tool Microsoft would use to add Digital Rights Management (DRM) features to Windows or limit the ways in which people could interact with their PCs, although neither allegation was true. Instead, Microsoft designed Palladium to protect users' privacy and the integrity of data stored on their PCs. Microsoft hopes that customer education during the next few years will help people understand why the next-generation secure computing base is necessary. "It used to be radical to give computing power to small businesses and regular people," Juarez told me last fall. "Then, [anyone] could get a computer. Wouldn't it be nice if security and certainty were like that? It would help people sleep better at night."
An unnamed company had apparently applied for a trademark on the term Palladium, and Microsoft didn't want to be seen as strong-arming that company. "We did not want to be in a position of rolling over them," said Mario Juarez, group product manager of Windows Trusted Platform Technologies.
Palladium has been one of Microsoft's most misunderstood technologies, and, as a result, the name had become somewhat tarnished. Critics decried Palladium as a tool Microsoft would use to add Digital Rights Management (DRM) features to Windows or limit the ways in which people could interact with their PCs, although neither allegation was true. Instead, Microsoft designed Palladium to protect users' privacy and the integrity of data stored on their PCs. Microsoft hopes that customer education during the next few years will help people understand why the next-generation secure computing base is necessary. "It used to be radical to give computing power to small businesses and regular people," Juarez told me last fall. "Then, [anyone] could get a computer. Wouldn't it be nice if security and certainty were like that? It would help people sleep better at night."