A customer clued me in to gaming website Gamers With Jobs, which he described as a more intelligent kind of gaming site. Always looking forward to the next disappointment, I checked it out. Amazingly, I didn’t instantly hate it. Sure, some of the articles (”I don’t understand people who choose not to anticipate upcoming games”) have that kind of good-natured insanity that probably won’t result in a 911 call that ends with somebody’s wife gurgling, but they don’t feel the need to paste sixty press releases a day or keep a counter bragging about it, so the jury’s still out. I found a rather interesting tidbit on their forums;

Microsoft has added another notch on their bedpost of truly stupid ideas. As per the usual, the sexual conquest was you and your wallet.

If you don’t want to read that, I’ll save you the trouble: Microsoft is not making money off of PC hardware sales so they want to charge you by the minute. I can’t blame you if you needed that recap. I only made it halfway through before I blacked out with rage and Mike had to revive me with the smelling salts.

Microsoft’s patent application does acknowledge that a per-use model of computing would probably increase the cost of ownership over the PC’s lifetime. The company argues in its application, however, that “the payments can be deferred and the user can extend the useful life of the computer beyond that of the one-time purchase machine.”

Right. Okay. I spend maybe three hundred a year upgrading an average PC because I stay just below the bleeding edge curve where the price drops quite nicely. According to the proposed $1.25 per hour Microsoft wants to charge me for a gaming rig, I’d have to use the thing for an average of slightly over one half hour a day to rack up those charges. This doesn’t count the amount to purchase, or the “premium” charges for upgrading, or the “probably” little extra cost after you’ve upgraded.

In other words, a gaming rig would be $1.25 per hour right now and never again. The price is only going to go up.

Rather than cutting this into tiny pieces, let’s just take that “Microsoft admits… a per-use model of computing would probably increase the cost of ownership over the PC’s lifetime.” and combine it with the following:

“Rather than suffering through less-than-adequate performance for a significant portion of the life of a computer, a user can increase performance level over time, at a slight premium of payments,” the application reads. “When the performance level finally reaches its maximum and still better performance is required, then the user may upgrade to a new computer, running at a relatively low performance level, probably with little or no change in the cost of use.”

That’s EXACTLY what I do now, except I’m not paying taxes to Jobe. After rebranding PC games with the utterly useless Games for Windows tag, it appears Microsoft has delivered the punchline.