Microsoft Again on the Cutting Edge of Making the Computing Experience Suck
Just when you thought Microsoft had already used up all the stupid ideas possible:
“The current business model for computer hardware and software relies on a user purchasing a computer with hardware and software that is suited to the most demanding applications that the user expects to encounter,” said Microsoft in the application. “Therefore, a user may buy a multi-core processor with a significant amount of memory and advanced video support for gaming applications that are only used on the weekend, while the user’s day-in, day-out activities may involve little more than word processing or web-browsing.”Microsoft’s plan would instead monitor the machine to track things such as disk storage space, processor cores and memory used, then bill the user for what was consumed during a set period.
Yep, you read that right: you would buy a computer, but there would be a meter and a lock built into it, and Microsoft would monitor what you do and how much you do of it, and charge you for that–for example, gaming would rack up $1.25 per hour. In short, they are trying to do to you what the media companies are doing: maintain ownership and control not just of the copyrights to what you own, but to retain ownership and control of the machine itself and everything you have on it. Want to play a game? You might balk at how much it costs per minute. Want to edit that family movie? Whoa there, it’d use so many gigabytes that you’d see a jump in your monthly PC bill.
I mean, come on, metered computer usage? Who the hell wants to be thinking about how much rental fees they’re going to be racking up every time they want to check their email or surf the web? Talk about a way to kill the joy of using a computer. They might as well add a window to the top right corner of the screen telling you how much money you’re spending, and make it go “ka-ching!” every time you spent another dollar.
Not to mention privacy issues; despite all manner of reassurances, you can bet your last dollar that Microsoft will be collecting information on what you use and how you use it to figure out how to market stuff to you–the equivalent of the supermarket using those member cards to track your purchases.
Well, hey, at least this way could save you money, right?
But the company admitted that the overall cost to the user might be higher than for a standard PC purchase. “Although the cost of ownership over the life of the computer may be higher than that of a one-time purchase, the payments can be deferred and the user can extend the useful life of the computer beyond that of the one-time purchase machine,” Microsoft contended.
In other words, unless you’re the kind of person who buys a super-high-horsepwer machine and then uses it just for web browsing a few times a week, and then buys a newer model just a few years later, then this new system would definitely cost more. Microsoft isn’t looking to improve the computer experience, they’re just looking for new ways to apply the age-old bait-and-switch.
Think about it. They speculate that:
word processing and spreadsheet software that could access two of three processor cores and a medium level of graphics performance [would cost], say, $1 an hour.
Okay, so let’s say you use your computer for two hours a day, on average. At $1 per hour, that’s $730 a year, or $2190 over a 3-year period. If you own your computer for five years, it’s $3650. And that’s for medium usage, just word processing and spreadsheet stuff. Um, yeah, that cost “may be higher” than buying a $500 PC and using it as much as you damn well please.
Finally, we have the cherry on top:
The security module would also lock the PC to a specific supplier, perhaps an ISP, much as a subsidized cell phone is locked to a specific mobile carrier for the life of a contract.
Yes, in addition to not owning my own computer, having to pay for using what’s in my own house on an hourly basis, being monitored by the huge corporation, and being charged more money, I would also like to be locked into one service provider–which, of course, is the best feature of the cell phone experience, am I right?
In a way, I hope they implement this; it will drive up the value of my Apple stock immensely.
It sounds strange on consumer level hardware but on some enterprise servers you pay for the hardware as you use it. For example you buy a big server from Sun with 12 processors but you only need to use 4 at your current load. So you pay to have the 4 processors turned on. 6 months later your load increases suddenly and you call Sun. They will turn on another 2 processors and bill you for them at that point. Not really the same thing as MSFT charging per hour but kind of similar.
People use MS-Windows simply because it is the broadest standard – same with MS-Office. This is the revenue stream that keeps Microsoft running.
The old saying pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered applies here.
MS products are crap or just above the crap level. It really wouldn’t take too much to get people to move off the Microsoft platform because they already have a prohibitive cost. A major technology shift could cause a massive shift away from Microsoft.
Already there’s is a minor technology paradigm shift away from Microsoft caused by the emergence of Network Computers. People are buying these cheap, small, light micro computers so they can use them on the fly, especially for surfing the internet at coffee houses and what not. For these devices and these uses they don’t need windows bloatware. They can use Linux and down load open office.
Windows is obviously aware of the threat because they allow manufactures to install Windows XP instead of windows Vista, xp being a much thinner operating system.
Again these new Network, or Net Book computers are only a minor technology shift – what will happen if there’s another new technology shift?
If the price of ‘net book’ computers falls below, say $250 dollars running linux, people will buy them and leave Windows for only their larger machines. A cheap machine allows them to not worry about damaging it as they move about – so that increases their mobility. Also, if they keep their documents on the web or jump drive, they don’t have to worry about loosing them if they damage the machine as they move about. So for the ‘net book’ computers, driving down the price is more important than increased functionality. This shift might cause a shift to using Open Office.
People will use open office more and more because its free and they can run it on both their linux machines and their MS machines. Once that happens, it would seem to me that Microsoft will be facing it’s mortality.
(None of this mentions the impact of Chinese industrial policy. An economy as big as China’s or India’s has little interest in being held hostage to a foreign company – that’s just lost dollars, so industrial policy in these markets might also create a trend towards use of open systems.)
Microsoft is trying to find a way to continue to extract ‘monopoly rents’ from computing. I’m no technology buff, but one can take a step back and see that the price of computing hardware is falling and will continue to fall. As technology falls in price, people will become less tolerant of expensive software. Also as technology cost drop, the market starts to fragment – an the net books capture some of this phenomina. For most people computing means email, surfing the internet, gaming and basic office software functions. The only demanding use in all of this is gaming. For anyone that doesn’t do gaming, then a thin agent is all they need.
Right now it would seem to me that Microsoft is an obstructionist position to these trends. Microsoft needs to either offer better software or cheaper software or both. They don’t seem to be able to do either. In order to continue to get monopoly rents, their only other course is to attempt slow down this trend.
I don’t see that happening. In the future people will have an MS or Apple machine at home and a linux net book they keep in their purse or back pack or car (look for car manufacturers to offer a pair of them with the sale of any car). Hard core gamers might buy MS machines because that gets them the most muscle for their buck, but increasingly they’ll lean towards linux too. The rest of us will increasingly move towards Apple for their home machines because of stability, security, ease of use and greater utility.
Microsoft will run to try keep up with Apple but it will always be like buying a Chevy and Apple will be like buying a BMW. Microsoft doesn’t know how to build good software and they are never first with an idea. Over time Microsoft’s market will thin.
A technology friend of mine once said, in the mid 1990s, that IBM should have just given OS/2 away in the early 90s to block Microsoft. We are about at the point where Microsoft should be doing the same. It’s hard to compete with free and near free.
Bill Gates built a hundred plus billion dollar empire on second class software. That’s quite an accomplishment in itself. But the cost to the economy over the years has to be enormous when compared with running software that didn’t lock up and was hard to infect with a virus. How many lost man hours has Gates’ empire cost the global economy? It would have to be a staggering number.
The real cure to the economic depression in the world is in the development of new technologies to either lower transaction cost &/or increase productivity. Cheaper computing will contribute to the solution.
I don’t understand how Microsoft would be allowed to charge for use of hardware unless they start manufacturing their own computers. I also don’t follow this logic at the end of the article: “The user is able to migrate the performance level of the computer as needs change over time” — as if this wasn’t possible with a machine the user flat-out owns? I am glad I made the switch to a Mac already.