Rent or buy?

With MS’ .NET predicted to become all pervasive, David Dorn ponders the thought, and decides it’s not a good idea.

My late father once gave me a piece of advice. He said “Never rent when you can buy”. OK, he was talking about houses at the time, but it’s a phrase of his that, I think, is likely to be as applicable to software as it is to houses.

Let me explain why.

Microsoft has this .NET thing that it’s pushing like a good ‘un – Iain Laskey has written about it here if you’re not sure what it is. One of the base lines of the concept is that we, as computer users, will no longer own our software (software companies will say that we don’t anyway, we merely have a license to use it), but will, if they get their own way, rent it for small bits of usage.

So, you wouldn’t nip off down your local computer shop and buy Word, but would simply fire up your broadband connection and log into the Word site on the Web (more or less).

You’d pay maybe a quid a day for the privilege.

Hmmm… as exciting as I’m sure that seems to the people doing the renting, it doesn’t appeal to me. I’ll tell you why.

Money

In order to make our service to you a tad better, I keep a count of what sorts of things you read here on the PPC area within AOL. If you think about it, it makes sense. In order to do this, I use a counter – actually a series of counters, each with different identifiers. In order to make sense of it all, I have also used one “global” counter that counts absolutely every access to any and every page within the site.

Now, when first I started using these counters (going back a few years now), they were free. In the last eighteen months, though, the company that provides the service has instituted charges. That’s fine by me. “Premium Membership” cost the grand total of £9.99 a year per counter. That was when it was announced.

“OK”, thought I, “I can live with that – I only use six different counters – sixty quid a year”. Now, though, they’ve decided that any single counter that attracts more than 5,000 accesses per day has to be paid for at – wait for it - £400 a year.

Oh, and there’s more. I now hear that they’re going to be asking a whole heap more money for a counter that averages more than 20,000 accesses a day (this is on average).

Now, this does not make me a happy bunny, not in any way, shape, or form.

If I was renting software under the .Net scheme, I can see the scenario now. Astute companies would make applications available for free for a while, get you hooked, and then start sneaking the price up – they’d start low – maybe 10p per day for each day you used it – and then slowly bump it up and up and up.

As users, we’d become very used to having that piece of utility available, on tap, as it were, and so we’d just continue to use it. That would end up costing…

Never rent when you can buy.

On the other hand, if we’d bought an application to give that utility outright, there’d be no ongoing expense. We’d have paid what we could afford for the software at the beginning. If we couldn’t afford to upgrade, then we’d stick with the version we had (for what it’s worth I’m still using a piece of software I got five years ago, even though its latest version is 10, and I’m still on 4. But, hey, it does what I want it to do – so why change?)

Microsoft predicts that the uptake will be mostly in business in the first stages, for its new “rent your apps” concept. I beg to differ. Most small business I know like to know exactly what their costs are going to be. They often don’t mind if they’re a tad expensive, as long as they know what they’ll be and can budget for them. If they don’t know, I respectfully suggest that they won’t go there.

And I’d also suggest that you, as a user, don’t go there either. Hell, it’s not as if Bill Gates isn’t rich enough already!

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David Dorn