Making IT Happen

Much reaction to Steve Jobs saying "There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk." Most of the news sites interpret this as Jobs saying that sub $500 computers are junk, but that's not the way I read it - he's just saying it's not his sector.

I think netbooks will grow and grow - RM are shifting huge volumes of their RM Asus miniBook in the schools market, and it's clearly not junk.

This is why Microsoft's announcement of Windows Azure is so interesting. They seem to have half thrown in the towel by accepting that more and more software can be cloud based - but that there will still be a need for client software and (my implication, not theirs) powerful PC's.

My view?

Corporate users need to be able to use MS applications - Outlook, Word and Excel - on the move. Netbooks aren't beefy enough to support these - we have users with 2GB mailboxes, and those who use 20MB spreadsheets.

If connectivity was good enough this wouldn't matter - they could just run their MS applications on the server and access them from a netbook. (almost all the rest of our corporate applications are server based) But it isn't. We've been running 3G cards for 6 months now and they are flaky unless you stay in one place with good connectivity - it's a bit like using a mobile phone in 1992.

Better connectvity will drive smaller form factor devices like netbooks, and support the shift of applications to the cloud, but it will take 3 to 5 years for these trends to fully materialise.