Pay Per Use

The Xerox 914, announced on 16 September 1959, was not for sale. Ninety-five dollars a month, two thousand copies included, four cents a page beyond that, cancel on fifteen days' notice — terms so favourable to the customer that they built trust by themselves. The reason for not selling it was not philosophy: at around thirty thousand dollars the machine was too expensive to sell. Out of that expedient, the company grew 41 per cent a year for twelve years and became a $2.5 billion business. It is still in the textbooks as the model case of moving from ownership to use. And the skeleton of «pay for what you used» has a red line running back to the medicine chests of Edo Japan.