Seth has done a great job at an objective explanation of what Palladium is (and congratulations to Microsoft for explaining it to the EFF without an NDA). It’s reassured me on a couple of points – for instance, it’s possible for a 386 Linux to take advantage of the Palladium’s features, and the Palladium doesn’t leak ID data about the machine.
I still think that it has strong monopolistic tendencies however. Given that anything in the Palladium can trash anything outside of it, but not vice-versa, there’s a strong market pressure to move into the Palladium context for most uses. And now we have a situation where not only are specific applications OS-specific, but specific application’s data files are OS-specific too. This is only as bad as, say, the Microsoft Word or SMB situation was a few years ago. But there’ll be no reverse-engineered OpenOffice or SAMBA projects. It still encourages homogenuity, even while being on the face of it platform-agnostic.