Alex Hopmann’s Blog

John writes that “If i was starting a company, why wouldn’t I equip everyone with these and ask them to use google docs and other cloud services? Massive cost savings relative to the old way of doing things.”.

These mini-laptops are cool, but I don’t think this is the scenario where they are going to work. They are tiny- that could be great for some people that are highly mobile, but for normal knowledge worker stuff they are going to be pretty painful. Small screen, small keyboard, The base Dell Mini starts at $350, but I suspect that the 512MB version is going to be pretty painful for cloud computing- browsers are pretty taxing apps, so lets call it $375. The Inspiron 1525 by contrast starts at $499 but with a real 15″ screen, normal keyboard and Windows. The discount sites often have similar laptops listed on sale for $399, so the mini laptop thing vs. low-end full laptop is pretty much a wash when it comes to cost.

I think John’s main point is probably that whether the base thing comes with linux or Windows, the main app is likely the browser and you can do amazingly well now with cloud-based computing and very limited local resources. In general I agree although its interesting to read Chris Devore’s experiences trying to go all cloud-computing and his more recent post about it not working out so well yet. This isn’t to say that it couldn’t work well for some situations but going 100% cloud ends up having some difficult implications that its hard to appreciate until you actually try it.

I’ve now worked with a number of startups that have most of their infrastructure cloud-based (GMail, Google Docs, Skype chat-rooms, Basecamp, etc) and compared to setting up all the typical office infrastructure this stuff is great. But it doesn’t replace the kinds of things where having some local software can be very nice, and its also made any network connectivity issues especially painful. Both Judy’s book and DeepRockDrive had occasional network outages in the office and when there were network problems people rapidly were 100% unable to get any work done. Bandwidth even becomes an issue- at DeepRockDrive we ended up with an office network with really poor bandwidth and when someone was trying to make a VOIP phone-call they would often have to ask the rest of the office to not use the Internet for a period of time.

All these things will improve with time, although fixing the network reliability issue will be the toughest nut to crack.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 10:08 am and is filed under Business, Hardware, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.