Microsoft Invents $1.15/Hour Homework Fee For Kids 580
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!"
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Said S.Balmer "Things are lookin' up!"
The Ultimate Steal? (Score:5, Funny)
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?"
Behold the Cloud! (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
MS has announced they will not enter the online porn industry until they can determine a way to charge by the erection
Man, talk about gettin' stiffed.
Re:In other news... (Score:1, Funny)
Well, the viagra people figured it out.
Re:8 cores, 3 Gb, 3 GHz? (Score:3, Funny)
I always thought it was a totem-pole-of-ducks emoticon...
Re:New model? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, at least it's a nice hotel.
Re:Only 52 hours of homework? (Score:5, Funny)
I did far far less than 52 hours of homework a year.
Thinking about it, there may be a reason I failed high school..
Re:Only 52 hours of homework? (Score:1, Funny)
Any time I did the homework, it wasn't checked. And any time it was checked, I never had it done. To this day, I'm very bitter about it. It seemed to me like psychological torture. I knew if I completed the work, the teacher wouldn't bother asking for it. And if I didn't complete it, I had to steel myself for the punishment, which was usually more homework, and so the cycle would repeat.
Don't ask me to pay for doing homework. I've paid already. I've got the scars to show for it.
Re:pay to park,....... (Score:3, Funny)
It was outsourced overseas
Re:New model? (Score:5, Funny)
Um, we're talking about Microsoft here. It might be an *expensive* hotel, but I'm not sure I'd call it a *nice* hotel...
Re:Unfortunately, you may be right. (Score:3, Funny)
Wait, I get it! It's just like those crappy upgrades and services the mechanic sells you which don't do anything, or which would be trivially user-serviceable if the mechanic were generous enough to just tell you so!
Man, I just wasn't getting it, but once you make the connection to cars it's all so intuitive!
Re:Patent application != model for future. (Score:1, Funny)
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).
Exactly! Balmer filed for three chair throwing patents this year alone, my personal favorite being the side arm method although it lacks accuracy of the over hand method.
Re:Billing for fun and profit (Score:3, Funny)
You'll note Sony Home doesn't cost a penny.
Re:8 cores, 3 Gb, 3 GHz? (Score:3, Funny)
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...
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
$1 per erection is too cheap, they get get an _average_ of $6.15 per-erection charging by inch. Or in my case, about $9.00
Re:interesting new model... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:New model? (Score:3, Funny)
Well, at least it's a nice hotel.
... with broken windows.
Re:In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
I bet copyright violation for that will have a hard penalty.
Re:The Ultimate Steal? (Score:1, Funny)
I paid $60 for my copy of Office Ultimate which includes EVERYTHING, especially things I don't need and/or have no clue what they are for. But... hey... $60 for Word, Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint... I'm glad to buy original software at that price.
Re:The Ultimate Steal? (Score:3, Funny)
Well, my kid is a straight A student and has been using nothing but OpenOffice.org for the last 4 years. Can't say she has any problem with VBA, because I doubt if even a minute percentage of high school teachers even know what VBA is.
Hell, in my company we have over 500 users, and I doubt if more than 10 of them use it. In my experience, the vast majority of users who think they need Office, not only don't really need it, they don't even really know how to use it, let alone be "masters" of it.
I can't tell you the number of people I've met who thought they were Office power users, and then watched them manually apply formatting to every heading, and create columns by hitting the tab key 6000 times.
Re:The Ultimate Steal? (Score:4, Funny)
"The big thing IMO is using a consistant (and at least in the case of MS office consistant means the same version, I dunno if openoffice is better about keeping thier layout engine consistent between versions) office suite both among machines you use and between the machines you use and the machines people you work with use.
Sure for simple documents conversions are possible but for complex documents wysiwyg word processing basically relies on everyone having a layout engine with the exact same behaviour (pdf gets arround this by doing a lot of the layout in advance but this loses editability).
So if thier lecturers all use office 2003 and the uni machines all have office 2003 then the path of least resistance is to use office 2003 on thier own machine(s). Whether they buy it at the academic discount price or pirate it depends on thier circumstances beliefs (some universities even have a subscription which allows students to install it on thier own machines without paying)
plus at least here in the uk they will probablly have used at least one of office 2K, office XP or office 2K3 at school or "6th form college" before they went to university.
plus at least in my experiance openoffice is a bloated pig compared to office 2K to 2K3.
I have not yet used office 2K7 on a serious enough basis to comment on whether it is more or less shit than openoffice. It is certainly very different from both openoffice and older versions of MS office.
Too much rum int eggnog? :-)
Re:The Ultimate Steal? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Or in my case, about $9.00 ...cough, cough, cough.
I wouldn't worry already. Even supermarkets give you "two for one" deals on everything, I'm sure MS would offer something like this to heavy users, too!
Re:The Ultimate Steal? (Score:3, Funny)
2007 is the interface the Devil uses. It seem I have to work some evil black magic just to get double space, and I'm certain I sold my soul trying to figure out how to paste unformatted plain text.
I will not work with 2007. Thats not some obstinate statement, it's quite literal, I will not work. It's like trying to run 240v electronics on 120v.
The thing that pisses me of mostly is they replaced the words with symbols. I know the word for "double space," I don't know what the symbol is! It's not like formating goes to some ancient part of the human brain where the symbolism for bullets is ingrained like it is for eat and sex.
Re:Wha? (Score:4, Funny)
Say what you will but Bill Gates' vision was revolutionary for the time. He brought shrink wrapped software to the masses. No one had done it successfully before him.
Revisionist history. When shrinkwrap software was an emerging market, Microsoft was but one software house among many that were producing good product on 5.25" floppies. There were also Borland, WordPerfect, Broderbund, Lotus Development Corp, and dozens of other companies. Microsoft was no leader of the pack back in the day.
Microsoft did prove to be most successfully ruthless dog in the pack, though. It's "embrace and extend (and extinguish)" market strategy is arguably a true innovation, and its use of vaporware to limit the encroachment of better technologies on its market share demonstrated a superb mastery of advertising and marketing skills. It has also demonstrated a truly incredible disdain for the fetters of morality, ethics, and law. Microsoft has never been particularly strong in technical skills, but from the first it has been fantastically good at marketing, including pimping its image.
Basically Microsoft has gotten to the top by being the most successful slut on the street corner, knowing when to give the chauffeurs driving the rich guy's limousines a free ride, and knowing how to sidle up close enough to the competition to take a razor blade to her pretty face.