Pay As You Go Stymies Online Bad Guys
April 23, 2009
I was surprised to learn from PCWorld that “pay as you go” is a method for thwarting online pirates. You must read the story “Pay-As-You-Go a Way around Piracy, Microsoft Says” here. Owen Fletcher reported:
Microsoft could reduce losses from software piracy by expanding pay-as-you-go plans like those it has tested in developing countries, a company executive said today. Charging users as they access services, rather than in one up-front purchase fee, could “take some of the pressure off of the purely licensed model of software,” Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s research head, said in an interview.
The idea is interesting. If you don’t pay, the computer fails to run the application. To make this work, the user will need a persistent Internet connection. The hitch is that my Internet connections (two high speed broadband hook ups) are not very reliable. Even when these are working, we experience issues with Windows Genuine Advantage even thought we pay the MSDN fees, Apple iTunes which thinks I have five authorized computers not two, and various Adobe products that generate such messages as “updated failed to launch” every time I launch Adobe CS2 on a machine with Adobe CS3 installed.
Great in theory. Practice, at least in the near future, is not likely to work in my office. I am even more skeptical about getting this notion working in some of the exciting countries I have had the pleasure of visiting. Moving this notion to enterprise applications like search raises even more questions for me. Microsoft is anchored in on premises technology, so the company has some engineering hurdles to get over as well.
Stephen Arnold, April 23, 2009
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