Jakob Nielsen on Bill Gates' Micropayment Strategy

May 18, 2001 3:48 PM

Jakob Nielsen on Bill Gates' Micropayment Strategy (news section on right) Jakob Nielsen has acknowledged that Bill Gates might be smarter than him (no sh*t, Sherlock!). Gates would rather integrate micropayment systems into their server apps than IE to make Linux a non-issue for businesses wanting to use their micropayment system. Yet more monopoly nonsense or a smart business plan?
posted by wackybrit (6 comments total)

Jakob has always seemed fairly pro-Microsoft to me. Maybe Gates snubbed him at Davos or something. He is right about micropayments thought. With the .com meltdown and Amazon begging bowls we need a decent system to fund small sites (and big ones). One site is boldly aiming to stop Useit.com going under though.

Maybe a better credit card scheme could be worked out? Disposable numbers?
posted by laukf at 5:50 PM on May 18, 2001

It's the usual microsoft snowball of features. Tie-in a new feature: Office, Browser, .NET thin client, micropayments; give value to old software no one desires anymore (and so magnify your market share). Most people don't want Windows 95/98/Me - they want Office, or a word processor. Now most people can get a free word-processor and a free-operating sysetm. Word-processors are as standard as ASCII editors and no one pays for an ASCII editor, unless it has some marvelous new features, which is the point.

...when Microsoft's position in the OS world is threatened, their corporate instincts will tell them to pile more new features into their operating systems, and then re-jigger their software applications to exploit those special features. But this will only have the effect of making their applications dependent on an OS with declining market share, and make it worse for them in the end.
- In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson

Paypal and their ilk take less of a portion than creditcard companies, I'd prefer them to win this one. Microsoft Bank though? Ugh.
posted by holloway at 7:22 PM on May 18, 2001

Another group of crybabies is calling .Net a monopoly. These companies need to innovate on their own instead of trying to retard the competition through the courts.
posted by owillis at 8:43 PM on May 18, 2001

Yet more monopoly nonsense or a smart business plan?

Both, damn them. They might not technically have a monopoly, but they sure as hell know how to squeeze cash out of the markets with their unique position.
posted by jragon at 8:43 PM on May 18, 2001

Clay Shirky has an interesting argument against micropayments.
posted by normy at 10:30 PM on May 18, 2001

I read that some time ago and have been looking for it ever since. Thanks, normy.
posted by kindall at 12:10 AM on May 19, 2001