SynApps The Open Source and Gadget blog

The industry is preparing for the next wave in hardware - Netbooks. If this is a new buzzword to you or if you're simply curious about it a good recent piece about it can be found at www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/technology/21pc.html

Netbooks are the perfect device to access hosted services, leverage SaaS-type offerings. With offerings like MailXchange (http:/www.1and1.com) it is possible to achieve the same capabilities with a Netbook or mobile device that you get with a conventional desktop. With much less hassle. At a dramatically better pricepoint. For hardware and application.

Netbooks are gaining traction. And they are not the first attempt to make clients easier to manage. In Mainframe days all terminals where dumb. No problem there, hardware ok meant user happy. In Client Server the clients became thin and a bit more of a challenge to systems administration. With Microsoft living up to their corporate vision of one PC on every desk it all became a nightmare.

End users fiddling with printer drivers, people daring to not use what the industry thought they ought to - dangerous things like Linux - made the environment much more heterogeneous and complex to handle. For anybody, including Microsoft.  As a response the client operating environment du jour now is going to be the browser, with JavaScript proving schedulers and databases ... oh well.

The browser operating environment is becoming capable (if not technically sensible), remotely manageable, easy to deploy and maintain, well understood by many and offering a standard for hardware vendors not owned and milked by Microsoft. And the browser is where the Netbook user lives. This opportunity for the hardware industry perfectly complements what Open-Xchange is doing. Because the services required by (resourcewise) less capable devices are different. And because it does not make any difference what you are using to access all your data with, may it be a conventional desktop, a mobile device, or a Netbook.

Of course this is true for conventional (ie. established) free services like Google and Yahoo. But for businesses this should not be considered a sensible option. These providers get to own corporate messaging, calendaring and contact data. To leverage them for marketing or statistical purposes. And of course to prevent anybody from walking away again.

Only truely open (as in open source and free speech) tools should be considered to manage businesses' and personal data. And form the foundation for a growing ecosystem of solutions that don't require local resources and enable users to focus on their lifes and businesses rather than on maintaining their IT infrastructure. 

There is an obvious example why Netbooks might just be the thing for users. Communications skills will always beat brains in our daily social lifes. And communications rather than local resources is what these devices are built for. And the lack of brains, if you will, is more than compensated by having everything available online. From dictionaries more comprehensive than Encyclopedia Britanica, to comprehensive mapping services with even street perspective on a global scale - to all your personal information in your hosted collaboration solution. And everywhere you care.