Dana Blankenhorn puts in writing something that I've been thinking (and practicing) for some time: the destiny of any fixed PC is to become a server, always on and always plugged into the Internet. (Hat tip to Emergic.org.)
This should portend at least a product modest strategy change if you're in a telco. All those million-dollar voicemail systems, address books, directory servers and messaging gateways aren't going to go away. But their relative technical and economic importance is going to decline. Users won't expect to host their address book with every service provider they ever touch. Instead, they'll have it at home, accessible via a web service. The same will happen to all their other data. A few, wanting a more "business class" service will pay for someone else to host it. But information flows to the edges, so why build a business model that tries to push it uphill?
(It should also suggest a change in product strategy if you're at Microsoft: ever more complex client operating systems may be exceeding user needs.)
One of my reasons for going alone was that I wasn't prepared to pay a 3rd party to hold all my emails, but I also wanted access from any client PC. Locally downloading was not an acceptable solution. As users generate huge amounts of pictures and (in future) videos, self-hosting becomes a more attractive propsition. Why take your iPod to work when you can just stream your music from home? Why can't I have all my voicemails forwarded to my home server whene I can process and access them with any software or device I want? Why do I have to wait for a centralized telco system to be installed to get the features I like?
At home, I've got a Linux server what I set up myself. I use it to host my email, a few pictures for the web, act as a file and print server. I know I'm not alone. But within 48 hours of be flying to Europe for Christmas, I was stuck. There was a power cut back in Kansas City. My server happily powered itself back on when the power returned. However, unknown to me it got stuck at boot prompt asking me if I wanted to repair a possible glitch in the file system caused by improper shutdown. All I could tell was that it had disappeared from the Internet. The only possible resolution was to quickly buy some hosted email space and redirect all my domains to point there instead. There's a market here to package up a more reliable solution. And I can't imagine many people wanting to configure a NAT router to forward service appropriately. But I can imagine people not wanting to pay AOL amazing amounts of money for a piddly dot of hosted space.
Another development that will have to occur is to make PCs less intrusive. Quiet PCs are becoming a modest phenomenon. I myself ripped out the noisy original PSU fan and hard drive from the server, and put in new quiet components. In a classic "Innovator's Dilemma" fashion the PC market seems to be overshooting the performance needs of the public in terms of CPU cycles and polygon rendering. At the same time, it falls short as a piece of unobtrusive information plumbing that you can live with. A business opportunity beckons.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 6:12 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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