Rent the OS

  • Article

Wouldn't it be nice if we could make our OS pay-per-use?

We could rent our OS and all the required programs and let the customer pay per day or month as per his usage.

We could host all our office programs, all our OS on Windows Live and let the users have some dumb terminals which they dial into our Windows Live service then they use our services and log-off. At the end of the month we will charge the user from their credit card.

Of course, we could also give pre-paid rentals.

The advantages are,

  • Customer doesn't need to pay lots of money to buy the product. He can just pay as per his/her usage. After all, not all customers use all the programs always.
  • Customer doesn't need to get restricted to just one particular OS or program to buy. All programs and all OS versions are at his disposal centralized on Windows Live and he can just rent any of his choice at will.
  • No need to maintain anything, no need to upgrade anything. Reduced support costs for customers – reduced bug reports for us. We just maintain/upgrade everything centralized at Live.
  • Reduced Piracy.
  • A Win-Win situation: Customer always gets the best (As the new programs get available he can use them at will) – we continuously get the money (As long as customer keeps using the programs we keep getting the money).

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2007
    You just don't happen to work on Windows Live Core, do you? ;)

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2007
    I've an idea how Microsoft can make more profit than with Windows Live: Close the Live division. I'd never ever use this "service". Has Microsoft ever heard about privacy or only profit per share? My applications will be installed on my harddisk where only I have physical access to. And my documents will only be stored on this harddisk. Windows and Office is a durable good, not a nondurable good which I have to pay for again and again! And if I upload a file to my webspace, it will definitely not be hosted by Microsoft.