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Microsoft Invents $1.15/Hour Homework Fee For Kids
theodp writes "Microsoft's vision of your computing future is on display in its just-published patent application for the Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience. The plan, as Microsoft explains it, involves charging students $1.15 an hour to do their homework, making an Office bundle available for $1/hour, and billing gamers $1.25 for each hour of fun. In addition to your PC, Microsoft also discloses plans to bring the chargeback scheme to your cellphone and automobile — GPS, satellite radio, backseat video entertainment system. 'Both users and suppliers benefit from this new business model,' concludes Microsoft, while conceding that 'the supplier can develop a revenue stream business that may actually have higher value than the one-time purchase model currently practiced.' But don't worry kids, that's only if you do more than 52 hours of homework a year!"
You gotta be fucking kidding me ...
MS has announced they will not enter the online porn industry until they can determine a way to charge by the erection - film at eleven.
Said S.Balmer "Things are lookin' up!"
Am I the only one who finds it pretty funny that Microsoft's response to piracy of Office (which, I would guess, is most popular among students) markets their $60 version, repeatedly, as a "steal?"
'Both users and suppliers benefit from this new business model'
Only Microsoft could try to call a business model 'new', when hotels and hookers have used it for centuries.
At least its obvious what they are now
"Teacher I didn't get my assignment done. It was either buy food or rent MS Word for three hours, and I didn't want to starve."
and billing gamers $1.25 for each hour of fun
As long as they only bill you while you're actually having fun, I'd imagine that this would be a good deal for many of today's games.
They have some moxie, don't they?
I guess this would be successful, but it pretty much guarantees that all of your customers will hate you, even as they pay you. So really, it's a horizontal move for Microsoft.
As long as computing is as desperately cheap as it is, with $300 computers and free office suites, it's hard to see how they could make this work as a business model.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
What's in it for the consumer?
Do you supply a top-of-the-line PC and internet connection for us gamers? It might be worth it then, provided we don't game too much.
Do you supply a flexible, strong, compatible laptop for the school crowd? It might be worth it then, provided you don't provide incentives to universities or schools to dump more homework on the poor students.
What about the in-car entertainment system? Cell phones?
If I'm buying the equipment, I'm not going to pay monthly for something I currently get for free. The consumers, even the dumb ones, will be looking for alternatives. If no better alternatives exist, they'll be created.
In short, I hope Microsoft does launch this nice program, hopefully with the backing of the law, and other absurd things so we can watch the anvil break the camel's back.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
"The plan, as Microsoft explains it, involves charging students $1.15 an hour to do their homework, making an Office bundle available for $1/hour, and billing gamers $1.25 for each hour of fun. In addition to your PC, Microsoft also discloses plans to bring the chargeback scheme to your cellphone and automobile..."
And ads - don't forget ads...lots and lots and lots of ads.
Seriously, when is MS going to get off the same old profit-stump? Is there no one inside that company that can imagine fresh ways to make money besides licensing? Will MS ever come out of the ice age they fostered and find something to sell that the world actually looks forward to paying for?
Despite what MS would wish, software isn't a utility product that spins a meter at the sidewalk. It isn't a consumable that requires a refill after every trip to the coast. It isn't a treat that changes flavor every month according to some designer whim.
Software is part of a process. A process that can be solved by many means and anyone willing to devote the time. It doesn't come out of a strip mine in the Congo...market it according to the market, not to your desire to fill coffers and it will make money - I promise.
and billing gamers $1.25 for each hour of fun
Can we get a refund for a game if we play said without having said fun?
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
The user jacks his credit card into our system.
We store user input.
We process user input.
We output processed data back to the user.
We suck money out of the user's credit card account.
Behold the cloud!
If this is going to be the only option, then it's crappy and destined to fail. But if this is going to be an additional option to purchasing Office (which I think is more the case) it may still fail, but is at least a decent idea. Most students use Office only for homework that requires it. If that is the only time you use it, what makes more sense, paying $200 for the full Office suite that you will rarely use (and definitely won't use half the programs) or paying $50 for the 50 hours you actually use it(which is probably being generous in the time students actually use Office)? And factor in that if you have an older computer, Office may run slowly versus this online version which (if done properly) should run smooth as long as you have good internet access.
If this is an additional choice, I think this may be a decent idea (though I don't think it will be a hit).
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Come on now, we can always pay more.
Nevermind you lost your job, you're upside-down on your mortgage and you can't get a loan. Where's that American "Can-Do" spirit?
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
What's to prevent me from hacking the software/hardware to liberate it? Of course that is if I even buy one in the first place.
My kid has been told many times just to copy and paste from Wikipedia, I mean told by his teachers. Its most distressing.
I have brought the issue up at his school in meetings, but it seems that the tickbox teaching that the UK now relies upon is more interested in achieving teaching goals then actually educating the pupils.
Given that his IT class seems to really be 'how to use Microsoft products', I wouldn't be surprised if this service became part of the UK education provision system. Angry and disgusted yes, surprised no.
Lastly, dude, having a sig that would nuke a Linux system if applied isn't exactly friendly. On the other hand, I guess it would conform to the natural selection approach to weeding out morons, so perhaps its ok...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
An economic disincentive for our kids to do homework. That is not what we as a nation or any society on this planet need. Somehow I think we are missing part of the proposal. Of course I haven't looked into it beyond one of the links. I just don't see how anyone is going to find this arrangement appealing! There will be a massive outcry if they try to force this on people and it will die an even more pathetic death than Vista. Well, that is my first reaction and I don't think I care enough to look into any further... Heh.
It requires stupid people to work, as it is not exactly a secret that computer hardware is pretty cheap today. /.ers see it in computer hardware, and a friend of mine who is a professional car mechanic can tell similar stories.
Unfortunately there are enough stupid people in the world. Who doesn't have some acquaintance who bought some cheap crap despite advice that it is not really a good buy?
We
C - the footgun of programming languages
Hmm. On the other hand, I just shelled out several hundred dollars for Adobe Illustrator, a program I need only for a few hours a year (but when I need it, I REALLY need it). If I had the option to pay an hourly rate OR purchase it outright, I'd have chosen the metering. Actually, a lot of apps are the same for me - including all of Microsoft Office. I use alternative word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation packages (or just do it in my text editor / LaTeX), but every now and then I do need to use Word or Excel.
Again, given that there will be alternatives that are not metered, a pay-for-use model for some of these monolithic, massively-priced apps might not be a bad thing.
my kids get free "hand me down" PCs & printer with Linux & OpenOffice pre-installed to do homework on, (no subscription necessary)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Microsoft is already offering MS Office Ultimate for a one-time cost of $60. Why in the hell would I want to rent the same damn thing per hour and turn it into a $2000+ piece of software?
I don't get it. Every time I turn around, Microsoft seems to be trying to take one step forward...into another pile of shit idea.
If this doesn't send their users screaming towards (free) alternatives like Google Docs, I don't know what will...
Pardon me will I go don my Ballmer signature-series chairproof helmet...
Oh Goodie. My post has become the "important" one that other people latch onto with non-germaine observations in the hope that they'll get higher placement.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Computing 101
Assignment #1
Locate, download, and install Open Office.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
> When I was a kid, we were assigned ~400 hours of homework a year. From what I hear, it's more now.
Well, there's what they're assigned, which varies by grade and teacher, and then there's what they actually do, which varies by student. I'm not convinced there's any correlation between the two.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I find it perfectly acceptable to offer an option of full purchase and metered use. That way, you can minimize your cost based on use and cheaply use expensive software legitimately (a pull factor to stop pirating Photoshop, which increases Adobe's income and decreases torts).
How about if your net connection goes down or the business model flops? Same thing as "Plays For Sure"? They close up shop and leave you high and dry? Maybe you need to format your computer and it comes back telling you to take a hike or you need to use it for a couple mins on your laptop but since it doesn't have the TPM chip it won't go? This will only work if everyone who uses it has some sort of "Trusted Computing" software / hardware combo and by agreeing to install that what else are you agreeing to?
Just food for thought.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Kinkos charges about $0.42 a minute to use their computers that have MS office preinstalled. I don't own a printer, but the 3 times a year I actually need something printed (like christmas card notes, for example) that I can't get away with at work, I email to myself and print at Kinkos. Office depot will go one step further you can email them the document and they'll print it at no additional charge on whatever paper you need.
/Printer free since 2000
moox. for a new generation.
I always thought it was a totem-pole-of-ducks emoticon...
Meals on airplanes, I mean, what the fuck? You pay $400 for a ticket, and they can't even give you a ham sandwich? couldn't they jack up the price an extra dollar and give you something real to eat, instead of just cheap biscotti or stale peanuts?
Thank you, thank you; I'll be here all week.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Or, you could open it up in Google Docs, make the change, and save it. No install or money required...
I did far far less than 52 hours of homework a year.
Thinking about it, there may be a reason I failed high school..
> Traditionally, when you buy something, you pay one time or one total, and it
> becomes yours. This rake is $5+tax. It can be yours for that much.
The one-time nature of this traditional arrangement has been eroding for a while now. When I was about eight years old, my dad bought two leaf rakes, a blue one and a green one. They eventually wore out, but by that time I was in college. Meanwhile my grandfather was still using one that he bought when my mom was in gradeschool.
The last leaf rake we bought lasted about two years.
Have you noticed that you can't buy cheap wire shirt hangars that last forever any more? All they sell are the plastic ones that break.
I don't think there's exactly a deliberate conspiracy to do this. I think it's more a result of the market-for-lemons phenomenon combined with a shift in our culture away from placing *value* on durability and permanence, toward caring more about having the latest and greatest and trendiest stuff.
But I do think it's a bad thing.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
It was outsourced overseas
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
This whole summary is a troll. Technology businesses file many patents every year that they'll never implement. Patents are like munitions. You stockpile them in case you need to go to war, and to prevent others from attacking you. Balmer's saber rattling about Linux infringing on multiple Microsoft patents is the perfect example of this. (Though it's an example of the more sinister uses of patents).
AccountKiller
I just hope I dont forget to shut down or leave my computer on...overnight. Or over the weekend. This quickly adds up to the cost of just going out to buy the software today. I guess thats what they mean by 'the supplier can develop a revenue stream business that may actually have higher value than the one-time purchase model currently practiced.'
It would create an infinate loop, and you would have to reboot the computer to recover from it.
Three years ago whilst I was doing my ph.d. I was stupid enough to enter a command of this ilk 'to see what it did'. After having to walk two miles to reboot my servers I decided I'd learned my lesson...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Office depot will go one step further you can email them the document and they'll print it at no additional charge on whatever paper you need.
Kinkos does the same thing. https://printonline.fedexkinkos.com/
The historical stupidity of the USPTO not withstanding, I'd guess that this application as written is DOA.
I'm sure there is other prior art out there, but having just read the application, it sounds almost exactly like Amazon EC2. You buy different computing configurations (hardware and software) from a menu of choices and then get charged a metered rate based on your choice. The only difference I see here is that this application has you pay up front and then draw down the time instead of paying as you go. That isn't a novel difference.
What an awful summary!
The $/hour numbers and the homework example in the patent application are both simply illustrations. What the application is about is a method of creating, provisioning, and metering, and charging for a bundled unit of specific functionality within a cloud infrastructure. As I said in a previous post, I think they are too similar to EC2.
On the other hand, this sort of thing is a key enabler to any sort of broad SaaS infrastructure and people will use these services if the price is right. I just move several sites onto EC2 at a rate of ~$0.13/hr. For around $1100 a year I get a good infrastructure for less than what the server with no software and no connectivity would cost and I can make it bigger or turn it off whenever I want. Near as I can tell, the difference here is that instead of buying the power as a configured server instance, you are buying a configured service instance. This is a subtle, but important, difference. (But to my mind not a novel one).
So assuming they have some implementation to back up the patent application, I'm glad Microsoft is working on this because it's a necessary part of the infrastructure.
I did less than 52 hours of homework in the entire four years. I didn't get great grades, mind you, but I did pass. Getting high grades on tests was the key. I pissed a lot of teachers off that way because they all knew that I was intelligent and hated giving me low grades that didn't reflect that.
My view on homework was that I didn't need it to learn the material, so I didn't do it. Homework should be optional and given as a resource to study with. Students need to learn to handle their own education. If a student doesn't use that resource and in turn gets bad grades it's their fault, and only then should it be manditory. The self-efficacy gained from this will be great later in life because they realize that they are in control of their life and learning will continue throughout it. Forcing homework on them will cause them to not know how to educate themselves and they'll end up learning nothing after high school.
No existe.
What exactly in homework these days REQUIRES M$ Office??
Seriously. What absolutely can't be done with paper and pencil, or at worst typewriter and paper? (Which in computer terms, is any text editor.)
If a kid's homework REQUIRES a specific software, then that homework is teaching the kid how to get answers out of that software, NOT about the nominal subject.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yet another reason to protest and refuse when a school mandates a particular application for 'home work' ( unless its a class about that particular package of course ).
A word processor to write a term paper is not just 'Microsoft Word'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sadly you'll never have the option of using Adobe Illustrator as a pay-per-hour service now that MS went ahead and patented it...
I am among many open-source supporters who think Richard Stallman is generally too far out on the fringe, but I think the opinions illustrated in his sci-fi story "The Right to Read" are a pretty dead-on assessment of what is going on here. Basically this is what happens when software vendors are confronted with the uncomfortable truth that software is not a tangible good and can't really be sold or rented out for a unit price, no matter how profitable it may be, and they redouble their efforts to force that business model into existence, to hell with the consumers.
If you use Microsoft Office, do yourself a favor and switch to OpenOffice as soon as possible. The sooner you do it, the fewer of your files you'll need to convert/jailbreak some day. (Plus you might help to stave off some big dystopian-future scenario, which is nice.)
The code creates a bash shell function called ':'. This function, when executed, invokes two copies of itself in the background. The final ':' invokes the function which has been so defined. The result is an exponentially growing number of processes, all cloning themselves as quickly as possible. In other words, a "fork bomb."
I really want them to implement this business model, because it would be a great push for greater GNU/Linux adoption.
So its confirmed now the marketing guys from vista has lost their minds. No customer will accept this, luckely by the time it will be ready linux will be grown up. I think later or soon, the monopoly breaks downs the tree is starting to fall. Any empire ends, and i think this could be just the reason fir it.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Gee, I thought services like these were dead ideas. Remember the AOL days when you had to pay per minute usage fees? These days are no more. Microsoft really doesn't have a patent on this. When it comes to computing, metered services have been pretty much thrown out the door.
Excellent point. Unless MS isn't charging for the time in-between keystrokes. In which case their pricing scheme might be worth it. =)
Which reminds me of something. I've closed Word on my work machine before when I've had a document open on a USB stick. Then try to USB eject the stick and it won't go. Go into task manager and see that some word-ish program still has an open handle on it.
Run task manager, kill the exe, and I can eject the USB drive. No real problem but it raises a question: What if this stray process was billing me?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
...that the corporate scum can keep education out of the hands of the poor.
If taxation is legalized theft, then Capitalism is a prolonged rape followed by a slow death.
Having users pay per hour is ridiculous. Nobody will stand for it. A flat monthly fee will be far more effective.
I'm not sure how it worked in other countries, but in Australia, our ISPs used to bill per hour. It was horrible. You would log on, and then feel this immense pressure to go to all the sites you had to go to as quickly as possible. Then in the early 2000s they all started charging a flat monthly fee (with a capped data rate) instead. Immediately the "product experience" changes.
Whether you're paying the same amount or not, it's a far better experience. You can just leave the Internet switched on all day and use it leisurely.
If they bill per-hour for MS Word, it will be the same degraded experience. You'll be in a rush to do your work. Every minute you spend in another window will feel like a minute wasted. You'll hurriedly close down all your documents if you have a coffee break.
There's no way out of this - charging per-hour for software equates to a horrible user experience. Nobody's going to switch to this from the current model.
Oh, I still remember my childhood when we had quite literally nothing but a more or less sealed roof over our heads (ok, it was leaky, but we knew the spots where it leaked). Christmas was a lot of selfmade stuff and clothing, and cars were... well, our cars did work, but me and my dad spent a lot of time in our garage fixing stuff.
Before you ask, no that wasn't right after the war, that was the 70s and 80s. Yes, there were poor people back then, and there were people who went from poor to well off by work and not through government hand-me-downs. We didn't have the nicest and coolest gadgets, and our TV lasted (with IIRC 2 repairs) for the forementioned 20 years. But if we did that today, we'd ruin the economy, right? I mean, how do you think we could sustain that 10% profit increase per year? Think about it, to keep this up people'd have to buy a new car every other month in a few years!
But how should they do that, their jobs are in China.
The economy isn't really in ruins. Hell, we're not even a decade down, looking at the stock index. Was the economy in ruins just before the turn into the 21st century? Well, no, but back then most people still had jobs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.