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Get Ready for Rent-An-App
Baraka writes "Apparently MS is proposing a centralized, top-heavy system for delivering software applications in the future." It's kinda interesting: Web Applications in a way are kinda rent to own, and software licensing is so screwy that you don't
really own it anyway. As irritating as it may sound, it would appear
that application rental is coming... although not to my computer.
-- $SIGNATURE
Some of its per time, some is per use, some per month. Im not sure of what paticular packages are aviable: even though Im running 'blows on one machine, I dont even as much as have the novell client installed. And Im a fucking CNA :)
I wonder how microsoft plans on pusing the software down? The would have to get themselves a copy of ZENWorks....
I think they must be trying to appeal to folks who find software expensive. Do any of us have that problem? ...Thought not
Besides - I don't want Big Brother, or Uncle Bill, snooping in on my data... (or selling for that matter)
This is the kind of stunt that may have been beneficial 5+ years ago, but today we can afford the computer power, the software (for sure), and the support for the apps we need.
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Marques Johansson
displague@linuxfan.com
Marques Johansson
I would love to be able to: "The future of the Internet is not computer-based," said Jay Udani, vice president and founder of the company. "I can access the Net from a Palm Pilot on the road, or a kiosk in the airport, or at a friend's home, and that data is always available. I can move around and have a service that follows me wherever I go in the world." This is way better than the current way of software distribution. And "All upgrades and new features are added automatically, without having to download and install updates," he said. "You never have an out-of-date product." is also much better than downloading upgrades to free software and doing rpm -Uvh package.rpm
Umm large OEMs pay absolutly next to nothing for software. Why do you think so much junk software comes packaged with your computer, it allows them to charge more, while the price stays relativly the same. But in general good hardware is more expensive, and good hardware is really the only thing that runs on linux as crap hardware often won't. But if you buy a computer and you think your getting a real good deal when its a cyrix 233 with a winmodem for only $400 bucks, your being taken for a ride.
It just won't work. Why not? Does this remind some of us about what we remember of DIVX? You just basically rent it. Don't go telling me that MS won't keep tabs on what we have, what we copy to our hd, etc. I beleve that they're going to watch us. Look where DIVX is now. I beleve rent-an-app is going to lead that same fate soon enough, thank god. Go freeware!
Computers should be used as tools nothing more, nothing less
Fortunately, most free software developers do not believe in that narrow-minded cliche: computers are certainly more than just tools -- they can change the world for the better in ways that supercede the notion of just "tools". Otherwise, we would have little to be happy about in the software world.
Obviously a more controlled revenue stream, one which is predictable, and one which continues the advance of the Microsoft monopoly. You don't think you'll be running Windows and MS/Office off an X-Terminal, do you? No, it will be some proprietary protocol, encrypted, and damn difficult to reverse engineer (maybe even illegal to reverse engineer!). But the most important to Microsoft must be the controlled and even revenue stream such a system would foster.
Microsoft is truly a house of cards right now. Here's a fascinating quote from last weeks Economist article on Share Options, Pg. 18, Aug 7th-13th, which illustrates this point:
Their stock is badly overvalued. They pay their employees poorly, over-work them, illegally hire so many temps that it's turned into a Seattle political scandal, and make up the difference with stock options for their core staff. This suggests that a sell off could be disastrous for the firm and it's employees.... hence it makes sense for Balmer and Gates to both sell off now (which they've been doing) and to look for a new revenue model which can assure higher profits in what will most certainly be a saturated market within ten to fifteen years.
How should Free software and Open Source proponents fight this? We know how Microsoft is going to fight open protocols on the Net... by "de-commoditizing" (what an aberration of a word, clearly Vinod didn't have a dictionary by his side when he wrote Halloween I and II). And we know that they've already set the desktop standard with Win32/Windows. As long as they maintain control of the Office document standard through adding regular incompatibilities to thwart reverse engineers, they keep Windows installed on enough machines to make interopability with other systems a non-issue for the vast majority of users, and they succeed in keeping Win32 closed enough such that it can never be reverse engineered and re-implemented, they will continue to maintain their monopoly.
The Justice Department may will the antitrust case, but by the time it's worked its way through the court systems, I'd argue that Win32 will have long since been rendered obsolete.
This is why I think KDE, GNOME, GNUStep, and the like are a waste of time as far as attempting to take desktop sales away from Microsoft. Free developers may create a good MS-Office replacement like KOffice, or SIAG Office, but it won't ever read MS-Office documents properly just like Corel Office (Even under Windows!), ApplixWare, and StarOffice can't. Nor will a Freenix based desktop ever run exactly the same software (Wine may work well as a porting library, but I'm doubting its long term viability as a Win32 program loader -- MS will just change the underlying core OS enough to make they're new applications incompatible with Wine... it's a never ending game with no winners on the Wine side for this part of their project). Keyboard shortcuts are different, applications are different, they're all incompatible, and the current winner has a stake in maintaining this situation.
So how do Freenix proponents win in this situation? In my opinion we can't win just be re-inventing the desktop wheel around X (or Berlin, for that matter). I think the Open Source community NEEDS a completely new approach, one which gives it the "killer app" advantage over Windows which will draw users not because of political issues over freedom, but because users will plain want said functionality.
The next big revolution in user interface design is speech recognition incorporated directly into the systems interface with the computer. Something like what the Oxygen Project at the MIT media Laboratory is doing, with private funding I may add. (See this months Scientific American for a spread on the Oxygen project, the RAW CPU (a programable FPGA system), and their work with handhelds) I don't see any open source stuff from Oxygen... (does anyone know what their stance on Open Source is, and if they're currently accepting funds from Microsoft? If they are, who do you think will keep that codebase???) If you ask me, this is where Balmer wants to go. Everyone gets a handheld which is connected to the net via a radio/infrared networking, the system accepts speech input which is then passed to a server to interpret and resolve the problem, then passed back to the user in speech/video from the handheld. Such a system could be charged per minute, per query, or any of a number of other methods.
This is what the free software community should be planning to implement. And most of the tools are already available... IBM's Viavoice is a good enough continuous speech recognition system -- though it's not free. It could be used as a module within GNU common lisp, which could then serve as a foundation for a new natural language systems interface based on an "expert system" which understands a simple enough grammer and converts this to UNIX commands, manipulating files, directories, and launching applications. If IBM never releases ViaVoice under an "Open Source" license, the fact that it's a module instead of being tightly integrated into the system means that Freeware developers could rewrite the recognition engine -- maybe with funding from the FSF, a university, or some other organization.
Such a system would have to be tightly integrated with the desktop interface though, like common KDE and GNOME shortcuts, so that applications could know when to take speech input through their STDIN stream (like dictation) and know when you're attempting to give a command to either the application or the general operating system. Given GNOME's reliance on GUILE as it's "glue scripting language" it seems to me a bit closer toward integrating in a functional language with all its desktop applications, and thus being able to integrate natural language processing across the entire API suite. Just a guess though.
I think this is where Freenix ought to go, and if it gets there before Microsoft, they will lose marketshare quickly. They may die a horrible death just because their financial situation is so precarious, but that won't do the Freenix community much good; they'll just file Chapter 11 and restructure -- with their monopoly intact. For the Freenix community to take the desktop we must provide an alternative which is easier to use, not just free.
Of course, I may just be oversimplifying a very complex problem... Please feel free to resolve any problems of ignorance you may have noticed!
But they do create a necessary free foundation which was lacking previously -- I never much cared for CDE.PC hardware needs an update, I agree. Though I think that many of our hardware complaints are really expressions of frustration over what limited functionality current computers present. They're big, clunky, consume large amounts of electricity and thus expel noticeable heat, use moving/spinning parts at high speed, and they're still just single execution unit per cycle "Turing machines." Oh well. UltraSparc desktops really aren't physically that much different from Mac's and PC's. Nor are any other Workstation vendor's good much different beyond CPU, software, and name. The reason we still use clunky desktops now isn't because of dumb hardware manufacturers, but reasonable design given current hardware constraints.
I think we're going to have to continue to work with desktop based solutions for at least another ten years. By then maybe a general radio IP network infrastructure could be in place, along with those smaller and faster CPU advances Moore's law predicts, justifying a general purpose speech enabled PDA in the open market. This won't happen overnight.
So, while developing this technology may take a good decade, we should expect Microsoft to produce some kind broken speech enabled version of desktop Windows as soon as they can; maybe within one or two release cycles. They would be idiots to let Dragon Systems, IBM ViaVoice, and all those other third party speech toolkits to take over the market... when have you ever seen Microsoft do that??? It's already a viable business, Microsoft is there.
The Freenix community has a few advantages: IBM is currently giving out ViaVoice -- for now anyway, we have explosive growth going on with the desktop API -- meaning that change is more readily accepted by the current userbase, and we have several good Common LISP and Scheme interpreters -- with many skilled programmers. Given that GNOME already supports GUILE, updating a Common LISP variant to support the GNOME and GTK API's, along with integrating ViaVoice support, isn't impossible! And it's an important step towards making a usable "expert system" which understands enough to convert simple statements like "Move file1 to directory2" and "find all files containing the word 'foo'" into UNIX commands dynamically.
I think Open Source desktop systems like GNOME and KDE ought to be thinking along these lines now, because if speech is left unnoticed by the Freenix desktop developers, the UNIX community might miss a critical computer science juncture which will leave it behind Windows!
Well, to be fair, you had Andresson and others running around saying that Netscape 3 and Java 1.0 makes the OS iiirrrrrelevant, when if reality what they had was a POS and we still are years away from a distributed, secure environment. It's only natural for a nailhead like Ballmer to look at the 1998 state of Java and dismiss it because it had little business use for Microsoft.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
While that may sound horrible to us technical folks, actually for many applications it could be quite nice: you don't have to install or maintain the software, and it becomes accessible from anywhere. For mail, text editing, spreadsheets, printing and snailmail, FAX, etc., that sounds like a real winner. With a suitable platform (UNIX, Java), you might even be able to rent compute cycles for general purpose computing, again, without the headaches of maintaining your own system.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft believes this will work with their software and what kind of business advantage they have in that area. Right now, the only credible client plaform for delivering such services would seem to be Java, since ActiveX is too machine dependent and not secure or safe enough.
Lotus & Wordperfect? IIRC, the backlash started on the Mac side of things. It had been brewing a while, and then Macworld urged its readers to flatly boycott any copy protected software, and "key disk" software. It spread rapidly, and the manufacturors backed down in a matter of months.
As I've said before on slashdot, intel put the cpu ID opcode into the Pentium III at the request of micro~1.oft. The ID function built into each CPU will be one of the main components of the software rental business.
.02 euros
Software rental will require a scheme where a user can contact a rental server, enter their CPU and credit card details, then store this information locally so the software can check for current rental authorization before running.
The software can be pre-installed on the machine (the current micro~1.oft model of bundling all its software with the OS), or delivered as a try-before-buy demo CD, or DLable from the internet or ASP, use your imagination.
The user then has to enter into an agreement with the owner of the software to rent/license the software for a certain amount of time. The ASP then returns a certificate (strong encryption is their friend here!) which unlocks the software for a certain amount of time/usage (1 year or 3000 saves, whichever comes first).
The software then uses a cryptographically secure hash to compare the CPU ID, authenticated timecode (from an internet source), a local cert accompanying the software image, and the licensing cert sent by the ASP.
As others have pointed out here, the UCITA is another key component to protect software rental schemes like timebombing and limited usage, and to prevent reverse engineering with criminal penalties. Where the Sun/Oracle network computer model didn't make sense 2 years ago, now with the UCITA it starts to make a lot more sense.
I have to deal with timebombed rental/demo software all the time, it is a real pain in the ass. I've got clients who accidently base some key part of their NOC on some timebombed code, which blew up earlier this year. The outages were bad enough some of them made the news, but PR people were able to blame glitches or lightning storms. This rental model is going to fail in the long term, and the medium term peak will not be the trillion $$$ revenue stream some are predicting, but it might reach 10%-20% of the total software market before collapsing.
my
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
There's a very large difference...
Whereas you probably won't be finding, say, any need to keep around the latest drek on VHS, you *will* quite possibly need to keep around application software in the long-term.
Think data files. Think proprietary data file formats. Think about the existing investment in training, and how ugly it'd be to retrain employees to use a different package, or what happens if you communicate with somebody with an older version that can't read the current file format of the day.
There's a lot of required continuity. Even nominally compatible upgrades can break that, if behavioral quirks change or support is dropped (which happens...).
Which is more important: guaranteeing that you can obtain the latest "Zelda" release, or knowing that you won't be held hostage with unreadable data if the application subscription/rental rate climbs up, or if features you need get obsoleted (think: changing APIs, ala Java's deprecation, etc)? App software is VERY different.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Before that, there actually were some retailers trying to make a go of renting software, but it didn't appear to be working too well. Scared the heck out of the software companies, though.
And now we get an announcement that they're considering application rentals. This does not come as a suprise to me. In December, I started to put together the pieces, based on some comments made by Ballmer and Gates, and determined that MS was planning to move towards a subscription model. That is, you get Office2002, but it expires in 2003, and you are forced to buy the new one. This would also help drive sales of the OS and of new boxes, due to the aforementioned document issue.
The other really interesting thing I noticed though, was that they were working on a system by which Office would not be a set of applications at all. Instead, they would be subscription-model web sites. Login to www.word.com, write a document, and it's saved as a web page somewhere on the site. You can email it to people through a connection to hotmail. Access it from any place. And pay through the nose, since there won't be any other choice.
Now, that's the next step. First they need to get people to become used to the subscription model and wait a bit for bandwidth to improve.
There is a great side effect too. Since everyone already uses Windows & Office, and they'll have prevented anyone from keeping old copies of the software around (by expiring it & by preventing them from reading new files), everyone, even MS's competetors will be stuck with the web version of Office. Now who here believes that confidential files by Oracle, Sun, Apple, AOL, or whomever, will stay that way while on MS's web site?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
So, micros~1's proposal is different how? You pay them for X amount of CPU time to run your app on their server (the only viable way to keep us from pirating the rented copy, otherwise crackers will steal the downloaded code from RAM or HD and deactivate or spoof the self-destruct/reporting system), and probably for X megs of data storage space. Companies start selling systems with only the minimum power needed to contact the server, and we're back to the centralized-server-and-dumb-terminal era (except this time around you can't trust the people who run that centralized server ;)
And what happens when NT 6.66 (or whatever the micros~1 server runs) crashes, or there's a "router problem" or "bad weather"? All of a sudden, all productivity halts...
For further information, man bofh
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
Disclaimer: This comment is written in such a way as to repeat it'sself and to require the point of the comment to be decyphered... sorry.
And so are computers. Computers and Space Ships share a whole bunch of common properties, most importantly for the point I'm trying to make is that they're both completely different from any other tool we've ever had, and require different treatment than any other tool we've ever had.
NASA's Space Shuttle is closer to a bicycle than my Laptop is to a toaster. The laptop requires more effort to learn how to use than the toaster, and that's how it should be.
Remember, the catigory "Tools" covers everything from a pointy stick that you dig vegitable roots out of the ground with to a SGI O2. The O2 requires different treatment from the stick, yes?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
For the full section, use the search page of the U.S. House of Representatives Office of Law Revision Council, enter "17" for title, and "software rent" for the search term. The first hit will be 17 USC Sec. 109.
It's obvious that what the software industry wanted (and got) was a different pricing model from the motion picture industry. The studios sell tapes to video rental stores, and usually do not receive a cut of the rental price. Software companies didn't want there to be any rental unless they were the renter and received the entire rental fee.
Ever donate to a well known charity, like United Way, Red Cross, or Big Brothers/Big Sisters?
They, in effect, rent the software that tracks donations and names. Not explicitly, of course, but the software the use is so complicated it can only be used with the annual support contract.
Hey, all you wannabee hotshots, want to scoop up some of the bucks? Look for publishers like Blackbaud (Oracle), Results/Plus (Access), DonorPerfect, Donor II, and Campagne Associates.
Replace the database with PostgreSQL, Adabas, or Solid (forget toys like msql or MySql), make up the interface with PHP, and open source it. You'll kill the rental industry in charitable organizations, and your donation dollar will go a lot farther.
I could tell you how much these products cost, but you'd never believe me.
The MCI story today points out a BIG reason not to 'rent' applets. Just imagine a frame relay meltdown on Apr 14th in a world where people rent home accounting applets.
Yeah, great.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
like this. Generally, pay a yearly fee for
X users of a program at any time. So this
might work industrially... but it's nothing new.
Ballmer however proposed this for home use.
Let's look at the average software that will
be installed on a home computer:
WinXX
MS Office
MS IE
MS Outlook Express
Netscape
HomeSite
Shareware Apps
Games
Which of the parties involved is going to profit
most from this deal? The idea of software
rentals is basically trying to squeeze as much
$$$ from the home market as it can, as the
software itself is generally a fixed purchase..
buy once, that's it.
Unfortunately, this will catch on by other software companies because, yes, it is a way
to continue to get revenue for a piece of software
already bought.
The Free Software Movement is poised to undermine
the large corporations if this move does go though within the next few years, of course.
Consider the number of people that are buying
those close-to-free PCs with the requirement
to buy 3yrs of ISP service. The rebates at most
$400, but in the end, you'll be paying $720 for
the service. Why do people like this? They
only have to pay once for everyone, and it never
crosses their mind again. If Free Software
can offer home users one less bill they have
to pay, that's a big bonus for it.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
This is just sad. I seem to recall Microsoft bashing Sun for the same basic idea less than a year ago..Now they want in on it.
Hmmm.. If I rent a car, and crash it..I have to pay for it. I wonder if it works the same for renting Microsoft applications. Ahha! Now I get it -- You have to pay for it if you crash it! So that's why theyre doing it!
It just astounds me to what degrees people put up with this company. Whats next? "Microsoft Office 2000 -- $500 Down, And zero-point-nine percent financing!"
Bowie J. Poag
PROPAGANDA
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
I remember hearing a theory that the centralization / decentralization trends were completely cyclical. IE: each has its advantages, and every few years, somebody gets fed up with the disadvantages of whichever they're using and starts pushing the other one again.
In the centralized camp, we have the mainframe / terminal pair, the minicomputer / terminal pair, enterprise software updates via "push apps" (circa 1996), "network computers" (circa 1997), Web apps (Hotmail is an application by traditional definitions), and now this Microsoft thingie.
In the decentralized camp, we have workstations, PC's, and personal servers (ie: a single user Linux box) in their various generations.
Corporations always tend to prefer the centralized model, because it makes for automatic standardization (which is cheaper and easier to support), and easy censorship. "The computer is merely a tool" users also like it because it takes the responsibility of computer maintenance and administration out of their hands.
Power users usually prefer the decentralized model because they value privacy and freedom of choice. It's no surprise, then, what viewpoint most Slashdotters will take!
-- Div.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
While the idea is kind of neat, I'm not sure the model is going to exist either as soon, or as widespread, as its proponents like to think.
;0
After broadband is ready, the software services will slowly filter down, replacing commercial software packages.
I'm not sure. The utility of the interent apps really comes into play for products that you don't use often enough to justify the (current) full commercial price. For small businesses, or for home users who wish to sample a product, it may be worthwile. But for most corporate users, or developers, where an app is being used constantly, the it soon becomes worthwile to buy the product outright (even with things like yearly licensing and upgrades factored in).
For the home user, it may be a case of try before you buy, rather than the limited-trial demos of today. For some things, like using a Tax program once yearly, I can see the utility. Other power-use programs may not be so easily transfered.
The other concern is use. How would a charge be implemented?
Per-use, each time you open an app? Then we will have a situation much like AOL had when they went to their unlimited use plan. People dial-in once, and never leave (until Windoze crashes...so they'd still be loging in 2-3 times a day)
Or per-minute, as I know I have a tendencey to open up 5-7 apps when I get into work and leave them there all day. Again, it would be better to own it.
Howabout a per-file app, as each time you create a new file you get dinged. Again. I can see people opening one big spreadsheet, and just zooming to different parts as needed.
This is a neat idea, but there are still some issues that need to be worked out. That, coupled with the people that are pushing this, make me very wary of this model every taking over as the distibution channel de riguer.
--sugarman--
This can only be good for us in the long run. With every attempt on Microsoft's part to stretch their tendrils in to people's lives, the case for Free and Open Source software becomes stronger.
Consider this: you're an average consumer, maybe a little better informed. You are looking at two computers. One comes with Windows 2000, MS Office, MS Internet Explorer, and an MS Entertainment Pack. The other comes with Red Hat Linux 7.0, StarOffice 6.0, Mozilla 5.0; and is a bit more expensive, since it uses higher quality hardware.
You compare the prices, and you think maybe the Windows computer is a better bargain -- until you take a look at this little thing at the end of the price on the Windows box. $1299, plus $25.00 a month for software rental??? Compare this to $1400 for a Linux box, with $0 a month in software rental charges.
The sad fact is, I can easily see Microsoft making a killing off of software rental, which IMO is immoral and appalling; and I can see Software Rental Fraud laws appearing on the books of every state, making it a felony to defraud Microsoft out of their monthly checks. The major question in my mind is what role Linux will play in this new way of doing business.
Finding God in a Dog
It takes a lot for me to volentarily put my hands in my wallet and support Bill, but Teledesic - satellite internet access at 2mb speeds for the entire globe - just might do it. At the rate telcos and cablecos are sabotaging their chances through exceptionally poor service and availability, I see Bill cleaning up. Much as I despise Bill and his current product line, I have to cheer him on here.
I just hope he won't require Windows to access it. Argh!
D
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