Whitewash, (long winded)
Here's my MSFT competitive view: I view MSFT as a competitor to Wave's current eTS offering only. Publicly, Wave offers eTS and some IP to NSM. The IP to NSM is safe, but MSFT will eventually gobble up the eTS business.
All MHO
I firmly believe Wave has been working with AMD MSFT and INTC for several years now (before TCG) on projects to bring the whole picture to trusted computing - possibly even before TCPA. Inside the PC there is a puzzle that cannot show the full "picture" until all the "pieces" are set. Until then, low-level options will be available, but not trusted web-services as Carly Fiorina envisions (in bed while waiting for Barge to bring her breakfast). As this happens, more and more services and power will be available to developers and users affecting the take-up rate of the services Wave has to offer (or anyone else). The snowball effect will have begun.
A lot of engineering is going into making secure computing and I, and others, believe its all been laid out already - years ago. The annnouncement that SPIN was worried about is an example of MSFT trying other interim solutions in case TCG fails. A company like RNBO, which is out of the box, is going to have problems in the future, IMO, due to the advent of trusted computing and SoC technology. They are out of the box, and how do you secure a building from the outside? I'm hoping that programmability and Wave IP is going to help ensure Wave's seat at this table in the box.
(dumbed down for any newbies reading) You can view the PC as a small town. As content (a movie) is distributed, it passes through different devices connected by wires (like buildings in the town connected by streets). At each building, the content (movie) must be secure. Like Lark's presentation of the bank truck going from bank to bank. If any one bank in the town is unsecure, the system, itself, is insecure and the money is open to thieves. The town also needs to be upgraded to allow for different traffic situations or better streetlights (security to stop unwanted stuff going on). This is why posters here were saying that getting the industry to deploy TPMs was so important. Wave just needed ANY platform in the box to see their vision through. The fact is that E2100 was competitive to IFX, NSM and ATML and they probably didn't like Wave for that. But, the TPM gets them all involved and making money and developing/selling these TPM chips. In the future, more and more of this will happen on one chip as time goes on, but currently, I believe Wave has certain pieces necessary to make the whole town work properly (the keyboard, smart card reader, monitor, motherboard). If those pieces were not available, what's the point of building the town in the first place? I think MSFT INTC and AMD understand that Wave knows the most about building this town the way its supposed to be built and in a sense has been acting as a contractor and supplying or building pieces along the way that are essential (securing keystrokes, securing movies at the monitor, key transfer, attestation, etc etc etc). Some of this stuff is going to be totally replaced by MSFT's o/s. Some of it won't. I think the whole roadmap was designed and agreed upon by the TCG members two years ago and the "big four" (intel amd msft and wave) have been working on certain areas ahead of time. Intel and AMD love it since they get to make more powerful processors to boost business and force the business cycle. MSFT loves it since they get to make new o/s functions. Hopefully Wave will be involved to tie it all together. Today, however, I don't know for sure what Wave's role will be in the future until more becomes public since this is all PURE CONJECTURE on my part. Until more is known, I am just being cautious.
Wave just needed ANY platform in the box to see their vision through.
Sure, we all originally invested to see E2100 as a platform for the PC, but if Wave is the "gatekeeper" as barge says, this investment will be equally lucrative.
As an aside...the PC devices also need to be able to handle the content. This is why I think WaveXpress is still a year away from making any serious deals. If you were to want to watch a movie and encrypt/decrypt in real time, you need more processing power than a 32 bit CPU can give. AMD recently released their 64 processor but Intel has shelved their idea for a 64 bit processor. Prescott's features sound like something intel thinks can handle it but still a ways off. So for now, WXP is really a Peter pipe-dream IMO, until the system can support what WXP's business model requires.
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