Amazon Go stores (in SF, not sure about the other 3 cities) -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... -- are micro grocery stores without cashiers/tills. Scan your Amazon Go app barcode on the turnstile as you enter, pick things off the shelf, put it into your bag, and walk out through the turnstile.

As you're walking out you get an emailed summary of your shopping with how much time you spent shopping prominently featured with a feel good message accompanying it. This does two things at once: Emphasizes time spent shopping -- because longer term when they build out these newer grocery stores that'll be a big draw -- and adds a gamification aspect to shopping -- how efficient/fast can you be at shopping can be a self-competition thing and at any point they can create a 'leaderboard' of shoppers ranked by time spent, money spent, etc.

These Go stores are also filled with folks who don't mind beta testing stuff. These future concepts being talked about can be tried out in these curated stores. A very useful real-life place to weed out the good ideas from the bad.

"Since most companies AFAIK work on a approx. 3 year replacement lifecycle"

My experience is that companies large and small do not have OS replacement lifecycles. Hardware lifecycles, sure. A set time on OS lifecycles won't work. Vista's been delayed for over a year, and XP before it. It would be folly for any IT director to state that they will be moving from Vista to Microsoft's next generation OS in 2010. It takes up too much time and resources for large corporations to be changing operating systems every 3 years. They will want to stay on a single platform for as long as possible.

And because Microsoft has the monopoly in that department, it means their OS lifecycles are dependent upon a single company, not the IT director's desires for a X-year OS lifecycle. That's the point. Nothing moot there...