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Microsoft Introduces Pay-as-You-Go Computing
An anonymous reader writes "Geekzone is reporting that Microsoft is introducing a new business model for 'pay-as-you-go computing.' From the article: 'The pay-as-you-go computing model enabled by Microsoft's FlexGo technology allows customers to have a fully featured PC at home by paying only for the time as they use it through the purchase of prepaid activation cards or tokens. Microsoft has been running trials of the program in Brazil for more than a year and will soon be expanding to select markets in India, Russia, China and Mexico.'" This makes me giggle, because it's basically the return of time-sharing; in the past it was for for mainframe systems, but I suppose the same concept behind the mainframe idea would be true in developing countries today with PC systems.
Hello young un.
When I first started work, I had to log the time that I logged into my terminal and logged out again into a black book. This was so we could double check against the seemingly extortionate amount of money the time sharing bureau charged us for the time spent on the computer that was on the other end of the line from my terminal. This was around 1983, which will have been towards the end of a practice that had been going on since the 1960s.
Oh, and your comment about this latest scheme being about licensing software is wrong too. They're hiring the hardware as well as the software. Just as they were in the old time sharing days.