> I don't think that's Gates' vision.  It's the wet dream of the entire
> software industry.  Rather than selling a license that may never be
> upgraded, they want you to continue to pay "maintenance" fees so you're a
> source of continuous revenue.

My employer does this. But then again, in the 14 months or so that I've 
worked there, I've released several updates with game-changing 
functionality improvements. And we have several more imminently in 
development.

MS Office, by contrast, hasn't changed noticeably since the 1990s. I'm 
sure if you search hard enough you can find some new features, but 
they're fairly small.

> But as usual, Microsoft is bringing up the rear on this, in actuality.
> Services like Google Apps (for business), Salesforce.com, and even AWS
> and other cloud "computing platform" providers have been doing this for
> at least a couple of years.

I thought the idea behind Google Apps was more that you can access it 
from anywhere. It's not like you're paying a subscription just to run 
the software on your local machine.

Similarly, AWS is renting server power, not software.

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