Most of the current discussion about the big changes under way in computing focuses on the software side, particularly on the shift from locally installed software to software supplied as a service over the internet. That’s what all the Web 2.0 fuss is about. Less attention has been paid, so far, to the equally dramatic shift that the new utility-computing model portends for hardware. The ability to deliver ever richer applications from distant, central servers will lead to the increasing centralization of hardware components as well – and that, in turn, will open the door to hardware innovation and entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n
Take Newnham Research<\/a>, a startup in Cambridge, England. It’s developing the thinnest of thin clients – a simple monitor adapter, with a couple of megabytes of video ram and ports for a mouse and keyboard, that plugs directly into an ethernet network. All computing is done on a central server, which can be either a traditional server or an inexpensive PC. The only thing delivered to the monitor, directly over the network, are compressed pixels. The device is called Nivo – for “network-in, video-out.”<\/p>\n Newnham, which is being backed by Atlas Ventures and Benchmark, isn’t producing its technology in volume yet. On its site, it suggests a few applications tied to the ease with which you can drive multiple monitors from a single PC, but it’s easy to think of much broader applications as well, particularly in schools, shops and small offices.<\/p>\n One nonprofit company, called Ndiyo<\/a>, is already putting Newnham’s hardware innovations to work – as a way to deliver computing to people who haven’t previously been able to afford it. Ndiyo began with a simple goal: “Instead of starting with a PC and seeing what we could take out, we began with a monitor and asked what was the minimum we had to add to give a workstation fully capable of typical ‘office’ use.” It’s created a system, using open-source software like Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Evolution, that allows a half-dozen users to share a single PC simultaneously, all doing different things. Need to add more users? Add another PC to create a little Linux cluster, and off you go. (For more details, you can download a pdf presentation<\/a> from Ndiyo.)<\/p>\n Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie talk about the disruption of the software market. Hardware’s going to go through a disruption, too – and it’s about time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of the current discussion about the big changes under way in computing focuses on the software side, particularly on the shift from locally installed software to software supplied as a service over the internet. That’s what all the Web 2.0 fuss is about. Less attention has been paid, so far, to the equally dramatic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}