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Who here is old enough to remember Larry Ellison's Network Computer? Chromebook is the realization of Larry Ellison's vision. Back in the mid 90's Larry Elliso
by whitefish 9y ago
Who here is old enough to remember Larry Ellison's Network Computer? Chromebook is the realization of Larry Ellison's vision.
Back in the mid 90's Larry Ellison said, "we need computers that do less, not more". He was widely ridiculed at that time. Now we know he was right.
- snom380 9y agoI don't think it's given that he's right or wrong. Apple has chosen a very different path (powerful devices with local apps) and they're also extremely successful. The real lesson, I think, is that most people don't want to _manage_ devices. They don't want to deal with backups, they don't want to manage disks, filesystems and drivers, and if you can take all of that away they'll be happy to store all their documents in your cloud.
- petilon 9y agoFor home and personal devices, Apple's approach is fine. But for business and education, central management is essential.
- ghaff 9y ago>But for business and education, central management is essential. For business, it depends. I think my company is fairly typical in that we offer fully managed systems but don't require that people go that route. (But you're more or less on your own for support if you choose to self-manage.)
- davidy123 9y agoLarry Ellison didn't invent this, terminals and "thin computing" have been around for a long time, it's just that browsers are now the best way to interface rich interfaces. The origins of VNC are an AT&T project where people would wear RFC tags, walk up to any workstation and have their session. This was long before Ellison was talking about Network Computers. There is also John Gage from Sun's motto, "the network is the computer."