[cute fuzzy bunny]

Absolutely true, appliances havent caught on at home or at work so far.

The work piece is easy: the only dangled benefit was cost savings and after running a bazillion studies and trying it myself in a fortune 500 company, it actually ended up costing more in direct costs while eliminating some indirect and hard to measure costs. IT just isnt very good at providing customized, personalized "experiences" to the end user. Its why PC's happened in the first place. The thin client model in business is really no different from a 3270 terminal hanging off a mainframe or a vt100 off a VAX. A system outage affects many and nearly entirely, performance suffers at peak usage times, a customer has no way to implement custom apps or customize extensively what they have, and its not particularly mobile or portable. That and theres a dirty little secret companies discover once they're up to their noses in a thin client implementation. PC operating systems and applications dont work well when you scale them to 500 or 1000 users sitting on the same box. Sure some that have been at it a while work ok, but you're entering a strange new and undiscovered world of putting specific pressures on products that is very different from the mainstream. <insert line about being able to tell pioneers by the arrows in their backs>. Then you decide to stop using large scale systems for blades and/or small server 'farms' and discover that it costs you more to manage and update all those machines than you're saving in hardware costs. If that doesnt finish you off, the rashes of user complaints your help desk has to handle will.

But theres a persistence to this that has an interesting root: most of your top echelon IT managers at one time or another may have run the mainframe or minicomputer shop at the company, and they feel very comfortable with the "big box" and/or "having control" of the enterprise.

Granted there are some 'big box' or 'blade' shops that will sell you a package of hardware and software that they've done some testing on and gotten to work. Just look at the prices. Then try to change anything yourself.

The home piece...welllll...a few appliances came out. Webtv (sucked because using the web on a tv sucks). Various MSN appliances (overpriced, small screen, no concerted applications packages in league with Word and Excel, small keyboard, no local storage, no organized online storage). Audrey (mostly the same problems as the MSN appliances).

Remember that most of these came out with four to six hundred dollar price tags at a time when a basic pc cost about the same, they usually tied you to an expensive ISP that didnt offer much in the way of services, etc. Nobody's tried one lately, although this prospective google thing wouldnt require one, once it caught on, perhaps people might find that their next PC might not be a PC at all.

How about $99 for the box or use your own PC, free internet access, free apps, free storage, some premium services for high end apps, local storage, more online storage, and you have to live with ads and answer a few questionaire/surveys now and then?