I have sold commercial IBM servers and mainframes for 30 years. Tiered pricing has been around most of that time - the more powerful the system, the higher the software cost, even though it is exactly the same software as that used on smaller systems. The justification has always been to equate the cost to the degree of benefit derived from the use of the computer. Applications are either tiered (tied to the the power of the processor, number of processors, or number of users, etc.). Unfortunately, I don't see any way of preventing this model from finding its way to the PC market. If Gates did nothing else, he recognized the value of millions and millions of people paying a relatively low price for a product. And so it goes....