I haven't seen people talking about Friedcat's franchising plans outside the ASICMiner threads, so I'm leaving this here to hopefully address some of the recent fears (such as
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=247168) about AM dominating the network in the future, and to encourage discussion from the wider community.
ASICMiner isn't capital intensive, and the costs are very small compared to the assets and profits, so it's built to scale fast. But as directly mining too much of the network total would break people's faith in bitcoin, this has always been a potential barrier to gaining too much network share, and Friedcat has always said he'll take steps to deal with this concern before unleashing the planned future hashing power onto the network.
So now, in addition to selling excess hardware, he's now announced plans to rent out further excessive hashing power so that growth can continue. Shareholders will still get growing dividends as the network share grows, but the mining will be distributed.
Update
Hardware Franchising
This is a new business model option besides self-mining and hardware sales. We will rent the excessive hashing power to financial and technical capable people, accepting full deposits at the market price, shipping the devices and collecting a certain PPS rate based on the theoretical hashrate. The PPS rate, the dividing of cost coverage, as well as warranty/exit strategy are being discussed in detail and executed as small-scale experiments.
This model is similar to hardware sales in the aspect that we do not have in control on how the users make use of our devices, therefore has more decentralization in spirit. And like with self-mining, it aims at settings in scale, enjoying the reduction of NRE cost and operating cost overall, and reducing potential marketing/advertisement/customer service costs.
Thoughts?