I think it's more fundamental than that. Software is non-physical so it is hard to understand paying for it.

Software as a Service ties the utility of the software to the physical machine since to get the utility of the software you must effectively rent the machine's time. This should be several orders of magnitude cheaper than buying machines and using them for short specific tasks for the vast majority of situations.

So this re-unification of the code's utility and machine use should be much easier for people to grasp and should ultimately yield business models that make more sense. I expect the change will push most software developers in one of two directions... small custom in-house (web|platform) applications versus large "Cloud Computing" applications.

Time will tell if I'm right. I've chosen to try and position myself on the side of large SaaS applications with small light clients. It makes more sense for everyone since the value of the code and the machines are implicitly tied together. Much easier for people to understand and understand why they need to cough up money for the software.

I would have at most 2 cars if I could have any car for $0. I don't like cars. I would get rid of one car if I got a 3rd car for some reason. I don't like having cars around.

I recently paid for an app where the developer had created a "pay what you like" system. He had a toggle for the price. $0.99, $1.99, $2.99 ... up to $5.99 IIRC. I chose to pay $2.99 because I had used the demo version for a week and liked his work.

After paying an email arrived with an unlock code and I unlocked the application from demo mode. I quite liked the experience. If I ever do an Android application I think I'd like the pricing to work that way.

Oh I get it. The target market for this product is mob-bosses.

Go eat some bacon and calm down.

You trade your cash for gold at these ... then you go to Cash4Gold and trade the gold for cash?

Will they dispense other kinds of bullion other than 35?

Why don't we ever hear about any of these?

So... why doesn't Microsoft do this?

I just keep hearing how "evil" Google is becoming... but they do stuff like this when nobody else seems to. These types of projects are the kinds of things an idealistic socialist government would do... yet here's a capitalist organisation doing them.

Does Apple or Microsoft do stuff like this? How about Oracle? If they don't why not?

am glad that thing is extinct.

The way my wife shops I think we completely exceed at least two of those criteria on each trip.

1. We commonly travel round-trip around 30 miles shopping.
2. We typically visit at least three stores approximately 5 miles apart before large purchases often cycling back to the first store before buying.
3. When we *do* buy online we typically save up a large number of purchases to the same online retailer before buying even with free shipping

Ironically, the "Shop Savvy" Android app means we now head out find an item, find it cheaper online then put it in a "buy queue" for later meaning we still drove but didn't buy.

I shall reconsider our shopping habits.

This is why we need trench digging and maintaining nano-bots.

... but you don't see me complaining here on /. do you?

Interesting point. There might be such a thing as too small and too thin. Hard to believe we've already gotten there.