On Christmas Day, 25DEC2008, a patent was issued to Microsoft for a "Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience." The exact words of the filing's abstract are as follows:
"A computer with scalable performance level components and selectable software and service options has a user interface that allows individual performance levels to be selected. The scalable performance level components may include a processor, memory, graphics controller, etc. Software and services may include word processing, email, browsing, database access, etc. To support a pay-per-use business model, each selectable item may have a cost associated with it, allowing a user to pay for the services actually selected and that presumably correspond to the task or tasks being performed. An administrator may use a similar user interface to set performance levels for each computer in a network, allowing performance and cost to be set according to a user's requirements."
Okay, in other words, users would be able to acquire a PC for little or no cost and pay to use different programs as services (being charged as you use them), like a cell phone concept. This would be limitless cloud computing to for a fee. According to Donald Melanson at Engadget (see his diagram of the concept above) stated it "sounds somewhat similar to the 'managed PC' that Microsoft developed with Korea's KT telecom a few years back." Pay-as-you-go would make computers quite a bit more affordable to the masses giving the hardware most likely longer life spans. A major downside to this whole idea is that it would allow Microsoft to exclusively set and control pricing on use of software used on a system such as this. But we all can relax for now as this was just a patent that was filed and Microsoft is probably trying to cover their bases since there has been a flurry of cloud computing initiatives going on. (source: WebProNews.com)
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