Rajesh Jain (left) quotes one of my recent items today and adds this somewhat cryptic comment.

"I think the next platform will be a service-centric platform, built on the Internet and assuming the presence of computers and cellphones."

Once again, we have wisdom from the East. (If I were in California instead of Georgia, of course, it would be coming from the West.)

This is part of the long-term, mainstream transition everyone is now going through. It's a statement that explains a lot of today's conflicts, between proprietary and open source software, between broadband and mobility, between customers and vendors.

Customers want to pay for what computers do for them. Vendors want to be paid based on their costs.

It's a conflict as old as business. History shows it is always resolved, in time, on the customers' terms. Like they say, it's your money. (The key phrase in that paragraph -- in time.)

In telecommunications, for instance, the service is having the pipe there, not sipping from it. Thus communications are moving toward monthly subscriptions.

In finance the service payment has long been the rule. For years banks have been moving from making money on "spreads" to making money for services.

The open source war isn't really between free and paid. It's about when the payment will be delivered, and for what.

For instance, IBM is a leader in open source, and they're doing fine. They charge for changing software to make it useful, they charge for hardware, and they charge for what the computers they manage do.

The problem is that buying services, rather than products, is unfamiliar to many consumers, and it doesn't match costs for vendors.

But the message of the markets here is clear. We pay gladly when we see value. And with computers, we increasingly see value only after the computers have been in action.