A newly-published patent application shows Microsoft wants to protect a technology for pay-as-you-go computing. The scheme would involve users getting subsidized or even free computers and then paying based on how they actually use it.

Microsoft filed the application back in June 2007 but, thanks to the extremely slow bureaucracy involved, it’s only just been put on a publicly accessible register.

Intellectual property law means that ideas – such as a pay-per-use computer – can’t be protected; instead patents only cover specific designs or technologies. Microsoft’s patent application, titled Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience, is for the technology which would make a computer scalable.

That means that as well as choosing which applications to run, users could also choose the level of performance they wanted from a computer. The technology Microsoft wants protected would mean, for example, a computer could have a single memory chip but the user could access different amounts of memory depending on their needs at a particular moment.

Microsoft argues that this would benefit consumers because it avoids the existing problem where they have to buy a machine with the capacity for the most intensive tasks, but often don’t need this power. The patent gives the example of a user who has to splash out to buy a powerful machine for gaming even though this extra processing power and memory is of little added benefit for more mundane tasks.

On the face of it, this technology is a win for the consumer as you effectively get a top-spec machine for a bargain purchase price. However, Microsoft (apparently wanting to please both sides) says manufacturers could wind up with higher overall revenues through this method.

That’s because there’s a comparatively small cost margin between different levels of hardware (for example, a 2 MB memory chip doesn’t cost anywhere near twice as much to make as a 1MB chip). Microsoft believes that under this system, many users who currently make-do with cheaper low-spec machines would be more tempted to use (and pay for) software with higher requirements.

The application doesn’t specify the logistics of which parties would be involved in the scheme, though the description of a security module suggests users would be tied to the manufacturer for the key hardware components.

As interesting as the idea is, it does have an obvious flaw: Microsoft’s involvement in such a pricing model is hardly an incentive to make sure future editions of Windows avoid the high performance requirements which many considered unnecessary in Vista.

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Entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 3:45 pm under Microsoft, Technology.

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