There is an assumption that I am making. From this quote: "My answer is for us as publishers is to actually sell unfinished games - and to offer the consumer multiple micro-payments to buy elements of the full experience." I'm assuming that he plans to protect the downloadable pieces with DRM. I mean, if he's not planning to protect the downloaded parts of the game, how does this do anything at all to impede piracy? Unless the real issue isn't piracy at all. Maybe they just want to charge more for games, and need some way to convince consumers that this scheme is in their best interests.

Yes, it seems like this guy is committing an act of double-speak. "DRM is not the answer to the piracy issue". Except then he then details a system that could only be described as DRM. This guy is either lying or uninformed.

The first thought is that Gmail users can choose to have Gmail mimic their desktop's exact look and feel. In fact, right now Gmail looks exactly like Mac Mail to me. This is because Gmail (unlike almost all other web email providers) allows you to use their email service through your own mail client. It was painless to set up, and they have instructions for most email clients.

However, for those users who do not want to use a native mail client, Gmail is still extremely usable. It is true that Gmail doesn't work exactly like traditional email clients, but that was one of their goals. For example, Google believes that using labels to organize emails and using the search box to find email contents will increase people's productivity. And they're right! Truly, people will need to learn new skills in order to work within this paradigm (though most people understand the idea of a "search box" well enough), but that is the only way to make progress.

Furthermore, I think that the paradigms that Gmail is using will become more standard in the desktop world in the next few years. Apple's Spotlight and Microsoft's WinFS will have some of the same ideas of "labels" and "searching". It's a powerful and flexible concept, and users will either learn to use it or get left behind.