Steven Perich

Just a quick one tonight to summarize my thoughts on TechNovus’s plans to release a “cloud computer” to the masses in Australia and India. Conceptually it’s not a bad idea, but it’s a bit ahead of it’s time and I can see a ton of flaws.

- their published market is “the masses”. WTF? The consumer and business markets have been completely saturated for years, at least here in oz. Who’s gonna want to “upgrade” to a machine that will have to first overcome the stigma of being slower, less reliable and expandible plus pay subscription fees?

- purchase of their computers required. Sure, they’re cheap(ish). But google and you will see that the current market trend is toward notebooks. In the low end and portability market, the Netbooks like the Asus eee-PC are killing it. TechNovus have no netbook range yet.

- the low end market that this is mostly targetted at is going to be the type that have a cheap 250mb/month Dodo internet plan. Given the recommended Internet speed of 1mbps for the TechNovus product, I can see gran’s overage fee at the end of the month being horrendous. Bandwidth is not ubiquitous enough yet for always-connected everyday computing. Not to mention grandmas stress levels after she gets knocked off her Internet connection the 7th time in a row. How will the average Indian user be affected?

- hardware is no more green than a laptop. My work issued Dell Latitude pulls 25W while being charged, approx 3W more than the TechNovus Navigator (and I assume the Published figures do not factor in a monitor!) A Netbook running an Atom cpu would eat this cloud computer alive in the greenwash stakes and still be connectable to an external monitor if required.

- Having worked as a sales engineer for a large SaaS web conferencing company I am very familiar with the concerns any business, hell even individual, holds over their data security and integrity. TechNovus better have a way to mitigate these concerns from day 1 or they will never penetrate any business market. By the way, forcing users to store data on a USB key won’t cut it. It’s cumbersome, insecure and prone to fail. Customers might as well buy used hardware and install Linux themselves. At least their fast hard drives can be used for data!

- more $0.02 on saas. It is absolutely wonderful for collaborative applications like web conferencing, presence, IM, unified communications and stuff like that. Most web 2.0 apps you know and love out there are collaborative apps. Many more you didn’t think would be collaborative in fact definitly are. They rely on user interactivity to thrive. Delivering standard office apps in an ASP model is a dumb idea. It’s boring, unsexy and has been done to death one way or another over the past 25 years. Just leave it to a monolith in Redmond and do something innovative!

- tell me again why I should pay $20 or whatever a month to use software I can download gratis? Linux, openoffice. They’re being offered. if Steve Ballmer is to be believed we’ll all be running office in the cloud in a year anyway. Good luck competing with MS!

No doubt I’ll think of more compelling arguments against this product but for now it’s 1amand it’s a school night