Who Owns Your Computer?
If left to grow, these external control systems will fundamentally change your relationship with your computer. They will make your computer much less useful by letting corporations limit what you can do with it. They will make your computer much less reliable because you will no longer have control of what is running on your machine, what it does, and how the various software components interact. (By Bruce Schneier)
This will probably be true for hardware and software aimed at the consumer market which is very much dominated by the entertainment industry in all its variations. That entertainment industry not only consists of Hollywood film studios or music labels. It includes ventures like MySpace.com, Flickr, YouTube and other large scale web services that are not clearly aimed at paying professionals.
A consumer PC will probably no longer be the same grey box as those used in offices. There will be a distinction. The consumer PC will be a device to entertain the consumer and allow to use certain useful services to create user generated content. And maybe it will be the consumer PC that will not have a local copy of MS Office installed, but use a web based office suite. Maybe all those Web 2.0 companies already got it and are just waiting for the locked down devices to appear. Who knows?
Large corporations most certainly will be interested in buying trusted computers for their employees as well. As experience over the years has shown: PCs with a multi-purpose operating system that gives the user too much freedom can create a lot of trouble. Locked down workstations, with exactly that set of tools the employee needs, might be seen as a blessing from the point of view of management and IT department.
What is left are those devices used by developers and others. Open source software, free software, etc. won't go away. But it might well be that certain services on the web won't trust requests coming from such untrusted devices.
