> In five years, it will be metered by the nanosecond to end users. This is not only predictable, but inevitable. The only people working at nanosecond precisi

> In five years, it will be metered by the nanosecond to end users. This is not only predictable, but inevitable. The only people working at nanosecond precision are likely to want a long-term project budget to allow for budget planning. > [..] specifically MS Office for business and Avid Pro Tools for film, will be metered in seconds, rather than distributed in a sales or monthly subscription model. Businesses have budgets to manage, and those are typically allocated on the order of months or years. Not only this, but the seconds interacted with these pieces of software would incentivize users to keep closing them, breaking workflow. I suspect we will see more license pools shared at companies for expensive software, with the possibility of pulling out additional licenses on-the-fly at an additional cost. On the other hand, an industry that may want per-minute billing is lawyers, who typically bill their clients per minute. That said, it's hardly worth the effort and is just considered part of the operational overhead of an employee. Metering hardware by the minute makes way more sense though, as is roughly correlates with wear. Things like electric scooters now charge per minute. But this is essentially the taxi model and this is obvious.