Re:Micropayments are Crap

[mccoy@communities.com (Jim McCoy)]

Stephan Vladimir Bugaj <stephan@studioarchetype.com> writes:
>
> Micropayment proponents are incredibly fond of the proposition that software
> could be leased on a usage time basis from a centralized server, and people
> could also rent time on the servers' CPUs.  Sounds an awful lot like the
> mainframe days to me.

Well, at the risk of being branded a heretic, maybe the mainframe days were
not as bad as you assume...  Back in "the mainframe days" computers cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the best way to most efficiently use
that resource was to tiemsharing.  Currently I would guess that 2/3 of the
possible CPU cycles in the world go unused, wasted by machines that are
turned off sitting in someones den or running a screensaver in the cubicle of
some drone in the marketting department.  With micropayments one can purchase
access to these cycles and put them to use, allowing the user to recover
costs when they are not using their system and giving the user cheap access
when needed to computing resources way beyond what they would be capable of
purchasing themselves.

> I see plenty of ways in which this benefits the vendor (greater control
> over distribution, centrailzed revision/upgrade distribution, greater
> profits over one-time sales, etc.), but no ways in which this benefits
> the user.  Especially the power user.

Some advantages to the user:

        -Faster and more frequent upgrades and bug fixes.  No need to
         wait for the CD or floppies to be shipped.
        -Better responsiveness from the vendor/distributor.  Currently once
         you buy a program you are stuck with it, warts and all.  A "test
         drive" is not an option, so vendors are led by their marketting
         droids.  With online "rental" the user has the ability to try a
         program before plunking down their $69.95 and possibly ending up
         with an unusable collection of annoying bugs.  This also means
         that they have the option of selecting a different program without
         risking paying the entire cost of a program they do not really want
         but which had good advertising.  Software vendors will be forced to
         actually pay attention to the users _after_ the initial sale and will
         also be motivated to create and provide more customized niche programs
         so you end up with a better selection of software as well.
        -Access to programs which the user could not normally afford or would
         not use enough to justify the purchase price.  I am not a chip
         designer and am not interested enough to drop $20K on a VHDL simulator
         and design synthesis program, but I would be willing to pay several
         dollars an hour to play around with one.


> I'm certainly not going to rent time
> on a compiler or image editing program every single time I want to do some
> work.

Then buy the program yourself, and then wait overnight for that ray tracing
and rendering program to complete two frames of that animated logo for your
kewl web page.  No one is saying that everything wll go to micropayments, in
some cases for software which is used constantly it does make more sense to
buy the program outright but in most cases you end up using the other programs
which clutter your hard disk a lot less than you think.  By renting your
non-essential programs you save money.

> It took the industry long enough to get PCs and workstations to the speeds
> they're at today so people could do their own work on their own machines to
> go back to waiting in a queue for time on a centralized system so you can
> have the honor of paying someone a lot of money to run your job.

How did you make the leap from micropayments (remember that "micro" prefix)
to paying someone a lot of money to run your job.  With micropayments you
can pay a lot of people a very small amount of money to run your job and
get it done orders of magnitude faster than someone stuck with a lone PC.
You also avoid getting caught up in the hardware game.  Just a few years
ago everyone was told they needed to upgrade their 386SX to a 486 or 486DX2
or they would be left behind, now everyone simple must have a Pentium, and
tomorrow it will be the next chip du jour.  By only requiring the hardware
necessary for user interaction on the desktop one can get better economies of
scale (hence the so-called "Network Computer")  If you could get by with
having a 486 on your desk running the presentation and interface level and
then rented cycles on a huge cluster of pentium cycle servers to get real work
done you would probably end up saving money in the long run, and would not need
to run out to Fry's every year/month/week to upgrade your hardware with new
pieces which would soon be obsolete.

jim