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