Five Reasons Microsoft Wants A Pay As You Go Model

[bar5]

Has anyone read this?

Microsoft Pay As You Go

What are your comments on this? Is this a good or bad thing?

Barb

[jcl]

People are reading way too much into that patent.

[martymas]

ok it may allow other operating sys to flourish

like linux

i have several linux disks

and they are free

and fortunately they do the same job as windows

i also have a sun micro operating disk

but the specs are a bit higher than linux and windows and ubuntu

and you need a really fast and big sys to use it

i feel microsoft are aiming at the chinese market

lots o people and lots of money

forget about us loyal users

over these years

f@#%&+ bill gates

marty

[hitest]

Has anyone read this?

Microsoft Pay As You Go

What are your comments on this? Is this a good or bad thing?

Barb

Pay for view from MS? I don't like it at all. It doesn't have an impact on me as I don't use MS products very much.

Sounds like a cash grab to me.

[JDoors]

Read about that elsewhere and ... it seems like the future to me. Subscription services are "all the rage" for dozens of other products and it wouldn't surprise me if that's the way to go with software.

Who wants to buy updated products every couple of years for if you only use parts of it or only use it occasionally? And who wouldn't want to use the latest versions and get instant updates if they DON'T have to pay for the retail product over and over every few years? I pay for my virus protection yearly, many people pay subscriptions for TV, Tivo services, satellite radio, web sites, etc. Why NOT for the use of software?

[Pete_C]

Microsoft has always wanted the pay as you go model where you pay by the machine by the year for the OS and when they retire an os you have to stop using it.

They wanted this back in the days when they Licensed MSDOS to IBM and that is one reason that IBM came out with IBMDOS and dropped Microsoft MS DOS .

Only when Bill Gates Microsoft came out with the "New Technology" operating system and began selling it to businesses for installing on PCs, did they come back and beg him to let them install it on home computers. He instead came out with Windows 3.11 and Windows95 .

Having learned the lesson the hard way, this time Bill agreed to the "licensed copy" approach. But he always wanted to be able to restrict it to a single machine at a time per license.

XP activation , and modification of OEM versions of XP got him well on the way to attain this goal.

Other microsoft software has achieved the same subscription and activation model used by antivirus applications and other software. You pay once for the original copy and license to use it for a year, and then pay each year that you want to keep it active for another year.

I really have no objection to this as long as it does not represent a major increase in cost over the normal lifetime of the Operating system or program.

Lets say that now the cost of the operating system is $200 and a new operating system becomes available in six years. Would $75 down and $25 a year be unreasonable? No, not at all; spread the cost over the life of the product.

Now if they were to still charge $200 and then add $50 a year that becomes ridiculous.

[sultan_emerr]

"Microsoft Lost Nearly $500 Million On The Web Last Quarter" =

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/22/micro...b-last-quarter/

[JDoors]

A half-billion dollars? Pocket change for MS.