Comment Articles

Home PCs need thinning out

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 09 Dec 2004 12:35 GMT

For the past month, I've been helping my parents get broadband. Their rural exchange is finally enabled, and I've guided them through the joys of choosing supplier, speed of capped or uncapped service, modems, routers and wireless networking. There'll be a short pause while BT comes up with a date when the planets are in the right conjunction and the gnomes in the exchanges can press the button. Then I turn up, plug in, configure and test. Then comes the great dance of the patches, the ritual summoning of the Firefox, a sprinkling of anti-malware packages, a spot of remote management magic -- and I can steal softly away until something goes wrong. I give it a week.

I'd guess that most ZDNet UK readers know this phenomenon, which for the sake of argument I'll call FAFSS -- Friends And Family Support Syndrome. The best you can say about it is that it brings people together and the grateful recipients generally supply beer, but it masks a very serious problem. For those who don't have FAFSS-qualified expertise on tap and can't afford £40 an hour for decent support, there's no alternative to going it alone. The result is endless frustration for the users, and zombie armies, worldwide worm farms and endless misery for everyone else. Computers that don't work properly are one thing: computers that don't work properly and are 150 milliseconds away from yours quite another.

You may have read my colleague Andrew Donoghue's report on the unwillingness of ISPs to take responsibility for the wellbeing of their customers. This is scandalous. Even if you're buying managed connectivity for a hundred thousand seats you shouldn't be buying your bits from an ISP that is careless about all its customers. It's like buying fresh water from a company that lets tons of sewerage slosh around in the pipework next to the purification plant.

There is a solution, and here's the second scandal -- it has the potential to be very profitable, not least for the ISPs. Yet nobody's talking about it: you can scan the literature of the industry sector concerned as much as you like and you'll get nowhere. The magic phrase: thin client in the home. With broadband and ultra-cheap high performance processors, the time is right for domestic managed systems, where the user buys not just a connection but a complete environment.

History is on its side. People love IT appliances. Amstrad knew this in the 80s when it made millions of word processors that benefited from the extreme cheapness of outdated 8-bit PC technology in disguise. Personal video recorders? Undercover PCs that will still be selling by the bucketload when media centre PCs are sitting just beneath the Ford Edsel in the business school textbooks of the future. So what's wrong with PCs disguised as working, useful, reliable, Internet enabled devices?