Microsoft (strangely) leading the next economic paradigm

Microsoft has lately expanded its plans to license their IP property. The only logical outcome of such a practice is that the technology Microsoft has developped will be improved without cost to them or Microsoft consumers. It is very likely that salient developments will be made, especially if academic institutions can benefit from educational access. In effect the overall field of software will expand in value and along will Microsoft's value.

One of the developments we have made at the Economics, Science and Communications Institute is a new model of intellectual property which emphasizes economic reward but opens the intellectual content of patents. As a whole, science is synergical and benefits from greater numbers of thinkers. Economic markets that were created in the last fifty years account for well over half of all economic throughput and are responsible for more than 95% of all economic wealth. Information is already the most valued economic resource and will progress increasingly faster with scientific research and advanced education. Education remains the most powerful economic investment any society can spend. Rewards only come after 15 to 20 years but they create much more wealth in their lifetime than any other economic activity.

Microsoft's move is a heavy push towards such a system. A rework of intellectual property is self-evident in the force that open-source pushes against commercial software. In a short lapse of time such development can be ignored but as it becomes as solid as commercial software it poses a rethinking of business practices. On a long-enough period of time, any piece of software that can generate a loyal core of developpers and users will provide more usefulness and value than a comparable piece of commercial software.

Intellectual property will represent a large portion of economic wealth in a few decades and will need to make use of all emotional computation capacity it can handle, the primary source of which is human intelligence. As artificial intelligence begins to handle most, and then all, economic processes, computation and information technologies will run the entire manufacturing, transportation and communication mechanisms while human intervention will be devoted to designing and developping concepts and theories. The future economic development of industrialized societies is directly tied to the development of information technologies, computation, specially nano-based computation, and telecommunications.

News.com — Microsoft expands IP licensing program