{"id":858,"date":"2007-08-24T16:01:06","date_gmt":"2007-08-24T22:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=858"},"modified":"2007-08-24T16:01:06","modified_gmt":"2007-08-24T22:01:06","slug":"wheres_my_cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=858","title":{"rendered":"Where’s my CloudBook?"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Markoff, writing on the New York Times tech blog, points<\/a> to “an obvious market opportunity” in the portable computing market: a lightweight, thin-client, ultralight laptop that draws its data and applications off the Internet. On a recent trip, the hard drive died in Markoff’s Mac laptop and, desperate to get his work done, he tried running the computer off a CD with a copy of the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Turns out, it worked like a charm:<\/p>\n

\n

What I discovered was that – with the caveat of a necessary network connection – life is just fine without a disk. Between the Firefox Web browser, Google\u2019s Gmail and and the search engine company\u2019s Docs Web-based word processor, it was possible to carry on quite nicely without local data during my trip.<\/p>\n

I had already stashed my almost 4,000 sources and phone numbers on a handy web site which I had access to, and so I found the only things I was missing were the passwords to online databases and my files of past reporting notes and articles which I occasionally refer to.<\/p>\n

Bouncing between hotel rooms to Wi-Fi-enabled lobbies and conference rooms, I was easily able to stay online and file my stories without incident. Afterwards it made me wonder why there aren\u2019t more wireless, Web-connected ultralight portables for business travelers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Markoff’s may well be right. The time seems ripe for the debut of a simple, cheap, lightweight portable with a browser, a wi-fi card, and nothing else. (OK, maybe a little flash drive, too.) If you really want to jumpstart the adoption of online productivity apps by business folks – and make Microsoft very nervous – create a cool CloudBook for road warriors. With the iPhone, Apple is demonstrating that the Web itself can be a platform for writing and running software. Why not take the next step?<\/p>\n

(The first part of Markoff’s post is here<\/a>. See also my sort-of-related post<\/a> from earlier today.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Markoff, writing on the New York Times tech blog, points to “an obvious market opportunity” in the portable computing market: a lightweight, thin-client, ultralight laptop that draws its data and applications off the Internet. On a recent trip, the hard drive died in Markoff’s Mac laptop and, desperate to get his work done, he […]<\/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-858","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\/858","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=858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}