1. Equal or better application functionality; as compared to Windows.
You mean a video editing app? I hope you don't mean an office suite or e-mail or browser, which is all 95% of users need. This argument either already is, or is within months of being, invalid.
2. Security ; my data is stored out there on some disk.
The technology is there now for you to encrypt anything you want yourself, and with a Sunray your data file doesn't travel on the wire in the clear. As far as more user-friendly automatic encrypted storage schemes go, ASP's will have to provide them, but all necessary technology exists. This is not something that's years away. Further, you could make the argument that your data is more secure in the other sense on an ASP's redundant, continually-backed-up server than on your single-point-of-mechanical-failure hard disk running under an operating system that writes garbage over FATs on alternate Thursdays.
3. Net bandwidth - just not there yet.
It is there for the enterprise, not for home users.
4. Stability: unproven technology, if the server goes down or my network has problems my desktop is dead.
James, give a guy a break. A Microsoft advocate using stability as an argument? How much of all this "extra productivity" from PC's gets eaten up the first time you have to restore your system from scratch? And as far as depending on the network goes, my full-function 2-processor NT machine with 70GB of disk, 384MB of memory and 2 SCSI busses is already mostly a paperweight if my DSL services get cut off.
5. Cost/benefit; if I can buy a fully functional PC for a couple hundred dollars more then what's the point.
The point is that the couple of hundred dollars gets dwarfed by TCO anti-productivity costs in an amazing hurry if you have to back the machine up, cope with crashes, reboots, bullsh*t Norton system administration utilities that no end user should ever have to know about (defragment your disk and image the file system, then optimize the registry grandma, and I'm sure everything will be fine), etc. etc. etc. That couple of hundred dollars is absolutely the worst deal in consumerdom. You're better off spending your money on the Home Shopping Network or Thighmasters.
Regards,
--QwikSand |
