In an astonishing move, Microsoft patented what they call a "Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience" (oh, Marketing had fun with that one), which is verbal sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-mouth, if you will) for charging you for the amount of hardware resources that you use, as opposed to you paying one price when you take a computer home, and then, you know...owning it.
I know a lot of companies are realizing they can make more money this way, but this is really going too far. People want to own the stuff they buy. Without even mentioning the ethical and privacy implications the 'phone-home' infrastructure required to even make something like this possible would have, nobody is going to want to pay by the cycle for using their computer. Microsoft still has a sizable market share, and if they were to switch over to this in a big way, it would have a massive chilling effect on innovation of new technologies. After all, this is a system that penalizes power users, similar to the ridiculous bandwidth cap that Comcast imposed on its subscribers with the scarcest of prior notice.
The people who come up with the great ideas are going to be a lot less likely to do so with the technologies of companies whose message to them seems to be "Hey, take it easy there." Keep it up, guys. The USA is already practically in the third world of Internet access, why not do the same to the hardware end of things, right?
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