Refinement

There are a few additional details to consider, which might appeal to you if you're a techno-junkie. Coupling software and batteries will open up some new horizons.

One refinement, suggested by Philippe Kruchten, would be to take advantage of large memory capacities to store the software for multiple devices on a single batterychip. This would ease the distribution problem somewhat, as one physical unit could then serve several different devices. So you might imagine a generic "cell phone" battery, and so on. What this would mean is that you could replace your Motorola cell phone with a Nokia cell phone, plug in the batterychip you used with the Motorola, and everything would still work. Of course, this would require that the various cell phone manufacturers agree on some standards, and that is always tricky.

Conversely, one could imagine a vertically integrated company putting the software for several different device types on one batterychip. Then one could purchase, for example, an Ericsson batterychip, which would power (both from an electrical and a software point of view) devices of different types made by Ericsson.

Today you can, of course, introduce all sorts of power-saving algorithms in the software to economize as much as possible on battery usage. We already do this in laptops, whose software ships with the device. Under our proposal, we would put these same power-saving algorithms where they more logically should reside: into the laptop battery.

Also, consider a generation "n" battery with generation "n" software. Let's say that, in the next revision of the software, you improve your algorithms and so on, so that you can get the same amount of work accomplished in the same amount of time with less electrical power. That means you can now ship generation "n+1" software on a battery that has less electrical output and still achieve the same result. So the price of the battery could come down, your profit could go up, or some combination of both.

These possibilities are all definitely within the realm of current technology but are not essential. They are refinements of the original idea, and I want to obey the KISS^[4] principle as much as possible.

^[4] KISS stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid!