Jim Morris's Thought of the Week (or month, or year, ...)
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Where is the Web Terminal Company?
There have been many past attempts to create and sell the “Network Terminal,” most notably by Larry Ellison in the 1990’s. Now that improvements in broadband, Ajax, and the many SaaS applications are rolling out, selling a box that does nothing but browse the Web seems appropriate.
My spec for such a machine would be a conventional PC with as much disk as I can afford, but it all belongs to the system for caching Web pages. The software would be Linux and Firefox. I can keep any private data on a memory stick, but mostly it would be kept on the Web somewhere.
While there is no savings in hardware costs, there are savings in software as it is likely to be free on the web. The biggest savings is in system administrator time. The terminal would be saving users from themselves by making it impossible to install and upgrade software packages on their own. In today’s environment, that’s what ends up costing far more than the hardware.
There must be several people doing this in stealth mode.
posted by Jim Morris @ 9:50 AM
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