Microsoft HomeServer and the new computing
Just before the holidays I bought a Microsoft Home Server, or rather the box was made by HP and the software by Microsoft. A few hours later the box was installed and every machine in the house had been backed up. Since then the only time I have touched the box was to slot in a couple of 1Tb drives to beef up the storage capacity. Total cost for 2.5Tb of network attached storage was less than $1,200.
The point here is not how great Home Server how different the market for computer systems has changed. Its not just the capacity of the box that has changed but the ease of use. Five years ago a similar three drive NAS box would have cost considerably more and I would have considered myself lucky to have 80% of the necessary features working after three days. That approach is simply not acceptable in today's computing market. Even a 1.0 product has to deliver the goods from day one.
It isn't just Microsoft that has got the message either. Before the launch of the Apple iPhone I was skeptical. Many computer manufacturers had attempted to enter the cell phone market and without exception the 1.0 versions of their products had been only fit for the landfill. Apple did not merely hit a home run, they hit the ball out of the park.
And that is what you have to do to launch a new computing product today. In 1992 the typical Web user either had a degree in nuclear physics or like me hoped to have one in the near future. Today there are over a billion Web users and most of them just want the tool to work without fuss.
The challenge going forward is how to retro-fit the new aesthetics and usability demands of the new computing user to existing applications. Today we author documents for the Web as much as for the printed page yet the architecture of Word Processing systems has remained essentially static and our primary tool for numeric calculation is the spreadsheet, a design originally built around the constraints of 8-bit processors with 32Kb of memory or less.
In particular we have to work out how to apply these new aesthetics and usability standards to security infrastructure. The reason that we hear so much about data breaches is not because governments and corporations have not heard about cryptography, its because they don't have the means to deploy that technology in a form that their employees can use in their every day routine.
