There’s an uproar at Slashdot over Microsoft’s newly filed patent application for a “Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience”. The patent application argues that, when a person buys a computer they shell out for hardware that can handle the most demanding application they’re likely to use (a graphics-intensive video game, for instance), even if that application is only actually in use for relatively short periods of time — the idea that the average person uses their computer mostly for e-mail, word processing, and web browsing and only fires up the video games on the weekends or whatever. Unless they’re evil software pirates, they’ve probably spent $50-70 for that video game, too.

Without getting too technical, Microsoft’s solution seems to be to come up with a scheme where you pay a fee per hour to use certain “bundles” of software and hardware performance is somehow throttled to match the “bundle” you’re using.

While Microsoft claims in the application that “[b]oth users and suppliers benefit from this new business model” it mostly sounds to me like a way for software companies to fleece their customers. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to envision instances where a metered pay model might be superior (one commenter at Slashdot mentions spending upwards of $1000 several hundred dollars for Adobe CS3, which he uses only a few times a year).

In any case, Microsoft made a typically poor choice in choosing the examples that it decided to include in the illustrations that accompanied the patent application. One of them reveals that the company envisions charging users a fee of $1.15 per hour to use a “homework bundle“, which apparently would incorporate some future version of Microsoft Office, some kind of graphics software, and even your web browser (the Patent Office’s website was a bit squirrelly for me, so if you can’t see the image, you can find a screenshot of it here).

That paper about Racism, Capitalism, and American Foreign Policy you have to write for a Chuck Hunt class is about to start costing you a lot more than your sanity and dignity.

Of course, there’s a very high chance that this idea will never fly, at least in its current form. And if it does… I guess there’s always this.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 18:04 by Vincent and is filed under Crazy, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.