Eric Schmidt reanimates el cheapo PC zombie Last week, Eric Schmidt ran his mouth off again at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. Schmidt commented that one of the new business models in the pipe for internet businesses is giving out free or subsidized computers to users and stacking paper on the ad revenue. He didn't actually say that this is …
"In the early days of desktop computing the PC was expensive enough to make this a possibility - but the network wasn't up to it."
Eh? In the early 80s, my DEC Rainbow had Ethernet access to the VAX cluster ... Granted, you had to reboot the machine into terminal mode (VT102 if I recall correctly ...). Prior to that, in the late 70s I had an TokinRing connection to the WAITS machines at SAIL in my dorm ... of course the TokenRing terminated at what we would today call a "router", from which I had access to many other campus computers. And prior to THAT I had access to misc. computers at Berkeley via arcnet ... It took about two weeks of hacking to get the hardware to work with my Heath H11-A :-)
"No need to install apps or backups - I could check for details of emails that I'd sent two years ago and forgotten, and catch up with what my students were doing on their eLearning course."
I was doing that with a Panasonic Sr.Partner "luggable" in 1984ish. From there, I had telnet access to anywhere the Internet was ... The difference is that I was dialing into my own "home cloud", which in turn allowed me out on the Internet ... My "home cloud" still exists today. It's grown a trifle in the last 25 years, but I have never had to trust other people with my data while on the road ... Today, I set up corporations in a similar manor.
It's true that in the early days it was all text, but the concepts are the same. And one could make a case for most of what is truly valuable about being connected is text-only.
People have the wrong assumption that in the NEAR future everybody will only own 1 computer. In reality most people will have 2; a smartphone-netbook hybrid for the road and a desktop/server at home. The average person on the road rarely needs computing power beyond what's provided by a smartphone or a netbook, so as long as they have good connectivity they will settle for an inexpensive gadget. When you need to do some video editing, play graphic-intensive games, or archive important documents, you do it at your home machine.
Google is going after the portable machine market, which is why it has something to do with Android. If they can structure the deal smartly (like cellular providers in the US giving away subsidized phones if you sign a contract), it has a potential to take off.
"its not a moronic comment to point out that the author has got one of the most fundamental laws in computing wrong. "
Maybe I missed something, but I don't remember Moore's "Law" holding the same weight as, say, Newton's Law of Gravity or even Ohm's Law. No, Moore's "Law" was more an observation Moore made that Intel (eventually) pushed to the fore of their PR machine (since he was an Intel guy) and sturggled to keep valid. Had all engineers at Intel and elsewhere stopped designing new processor circuits, Moore's "Law" would have immediately become invalid. And thus proved itself not to be a Law.
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