What does the most profitable corporation of all time do when it is doesn’t know what to do? It plots a failure.

Besieged by the media organization and creators of content, Microsoft was tasked to redesign its flagship operating system, Windows, to secure the digital rights of the companies that supply the media to the consumers. In doing so, the rights of the consumers were secondary and, in most cases, considered to be in direct opposition to the good of the media.

With this idea of Digital Rights Management (DRM) firmly in place, sponsored by all the big names – Sony, BMG, Universal, Warner, et. al. – Microsoft recognized that it didn’t have much of a choice in the matter since, for as big as it was, it couldn’t profess to be able to control the operations of these companies. It was a matter of size – and even though Microsoft was an enormous entity, it was tiny in comparison to the clout of the DRM cartel. So, Microsoft “took one for the team” and generated an operating system that was so riddled with problems that it served as a rallying call to show how bad the pursuit of DRM actually was.

As consumers complained endlessly that their computers weren’t doing what they wanted – that media files were being corrupted or were unusable in the name of DRM, Microsoft nodded along and pretended that there was just nothing that could be done. As the people became more and more incensed over not being able to use their media – music bought, movies purchased – a collective shudder went up from the DRM cartel as they realized that the consumers were beginning to see through the greed.

Slowly but surely, the DRM cartel fell apart. One by one they agreed to drop DRM from their products. Sony, the last holdout for the DRM-filled way of doing business, finally relented and decided to drop its DRM efforts.

Microsoft went out on a limb in this case, to prove a point that it could do something for the good of the whole. Its years of being seen as the behemoth that didn’t care have been buoyed by its efforts to liberate the people from the dark designs of the DRM-dedicated.

Now it is up to Microsoft to prove that this was its plan all along and to correct the DRM inspired malfunctions of its latest operating system opus.  Now it is time to correct the maligned Windows Vista platform and give the consumers the freedom that was so hard won.