Thursday, December 23, 2010

Changed my mind

After showing off the Cr-48, and taking an evening to think about it, I can think of an ideal customer for this system: businesses.

Buy a bunch of laptops, all completely identical, all capable of providing business functions, anywhere, anytime. Set the system up so that the entire computer experience is archived on the web (or your proprietary network). Keep your personal computer IT support costs to a bare minimum.

I'm trying to see what there is not to like.

As a business machine, this thing could be killer. It's going to run into problems when dealing with ultra-proprietary or confidential information, but I'm going to bet that Google is considering that.
It's going to run into problems when dealing with business specific software packages. Again, I'm going to bet that Google is examining this problem (Google Citrix?).
The Google collaborative apps have been a little cumbersome (Google Wave was hard to use, no matter how often we tried to get into it), but their online office package is incredibly easy to share with others. I think the tough nut there is remote, real-time collaboration.

The more I consider it, the more the idea of equipping a mobile business force with these systems is appealing.

And then it's not. I'm an IT consultant on the side (lately, WAY on the side). I need people to come to me with computer problems. This would do away with my tech support costs.

Hey, Google, any chance you're looking for a troubleshooter?

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