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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.
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!
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!
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.
Actually, they're trying to maintain their stranglehold on a customer base that is full of people who are beginning to notice that they are being forced to pay to upgrade their software every couple of years. (All software vendors force their customers to do this in order to maintain the revenue stream which keeps stock prices high.) Microsoft's target audience in this scheme surely isn't the "free software community," (not that there necessarily is such a thing---a debate I am unwilling to enter into here,) because we all caught on to that fact some time ago.
In actual fact, I think "renting" software is a good idea for the great masses of people who are either unable or unwilling to be their own computer experts. For my part, I expect the days of the computer as a mass-market item are numbered. Leasing software and other data services from a provider can conceivably result in higher quality and lower cost because the provider won't have to stuff feature after feature into the software (to justify charging for the upgrade) and will be able to release upgrades as incremental changes rather than as an all-or-nothing shot which has to be mind-bogglingly complex in order to handle all potential cases.
displague also said:
Well, there certainly is a trust issue. However, there are ways of boosting the customers' trust in the company. The business plan I have floating around for a business similar to this deals with the trust factor directly. It's all in the marketing and should be easy to sell to the vast majority of computer users.As a matter of fact, I think that the only question about the success of this scheme is not whether or not someone can do it, but whether or not Microsoft can stop writing the bloatware they need to write to make money "selling" software and focus on delivering high-quality stable software that will produce the most profits when you "rent" software. The "million monkey" approach is definitely the wrong way to write software to rent. My own opinion is that Microsoft doesn't write bloatware because that's what's needed to succeed in the current market. Instead, I think Microsoft has succeeded in the current market because they happen to be good at writing bloatware which is what it takes to succeed.
The times, they are a changin', and to throughly mix a metaphor, can the 500-pound-gorilla change its spots? Time will tell, but I doubt it.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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