The £199 laptop is about to hit the UK, in the form of the RM Asus MiniBook. RM unveiled the first example at the Handheld Learning conference in London last week, and is taking orders from educational institutions; a consumer version is expected later. Today, however, it's the tiny white hope of those who have aspired to have "one laptop per child" at a price schools can afford.
This 850g subnotebook will inevitably be seen as a rival for the XO laptop developed by MIT's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for use in the developing world. The Asus Eee PC, by contrast, has been developed in Taiwan as a commercial implementation of Intel's Classmate PC. This is meant to benefit education, of course, but it's also about "creating demand for Intel platforms".
What wasn't expected was the subtle positioning that RM's chief executive Tim Pearson gave the MiniBook during his talk at the conference. Using a graph that showed increasing functionality from a simple mobile phone to a desktop PC running Windows, he distinguished between "appliances" (phones, smart phones, Nokia's Internet Tablet) in the bottom left quadrant and "computers" (ultra-mobiles, laptops, desktops) in the top right. The RM Asus MiniBook sits in the middle, he said, and bridges the gap between the two.
Fixed functionality
When the MiniBook is shipped running Linux, it's an appliance, and when it's running Windows XP, it's a computer. Later, Pearson expanded on the reasons for his approach. He explained that RM's business was increasingly about taking responsibility for the equipment used in schools. However, a typical secondary school runs about 250 applications, including specialist programs for music and video. If every child has a computer, this soon becomes impossible to handle: "The support lines just get too big."
But Pearson reckons that 90% of educational needs can be satisfied by an appliance such as the MiniBook, with its built-in web browser and office suite. "If you've got a fixed level of functionality, it doesn't matter what the operating system is," he says. "How many of the people who have a BlackBerry know or care which OS it runs?"
The MiniBook appliance runs Linux, Firefox and OpenOffice, but they'll only be supported by resetting them to the factory defaults. "I don't expect the man in the Orange shop to give me technical support on changing drivers: that isn't part of the deal. With an appliance, you can only expect to use the apps it came with."
It's different when the same hardware runs Windows XP. "If we offer an XP version, we will almost certainly support it as an XP system," Pearson says. "We'd offer full connectivity and support for any XP computer. That's the difference between an appliance and a general-purpose PC, though you might find it quite hard to explain that division to a Martian."
Apple has taken a similar line with its iPhone, which it sells as an appliance. Because it comes from a computer company, runs a computer operating system (OS X) and does computer-y things like web browsing, many want to treat it as a computer. But as Pearson would say: "That isn't part of the deal".
Brian Gammage, a research fellow with Gartner, reckons Pearson's idea makes sense, given the cost of the device and the cost of support. "But let's not confuse the appliance function with the appliance support model, which means that we deal with it at the device level. When it breaks we either replace it or else we erase its contents and start again," he says.
Gammage wants to take this idea further. "The sheer scale of the markets and the issues to be addressed by the IT industry now mean that we all have to make zero operational cost and overhead a design function. That means we really have to start dealing with these things as sealed units. That's a broader trend. And it means that big operating systems have to become a thing of the past, which has massive implications for certain established companies that sell big operating systems."
Of course, there's nothing new about the appliance model of computing: dedicated word processors, games consoles and some early home computers such as the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A were all designed that way. It also resurfaces every few years. The problem is that almost every appliance has flopped.
The two biggest attempts to launch the "computer as appliance" idea were based on the NC or Network Computer and the PIA or Personal Internet Appliance. Oracle boss Larry Ellison launched the NC idea in 1995, originally based on a set-top box designed by Acorn, the small British supplier of educational computers. The PIA, which was hyped towards the end of the 1990s, was based on having a sealed box that accessed the internet.
Microsoft has tried harder than anyone in this market. In 1996, it launched a small modular operating system - Windows CE - for this new consumer electronics device market. It has been used in games consoles (Sega Dreamcast, Gizmondo), handhelds (Compaq iPaq, all PocketPC designs), mini-notebooks and tablet PCs (Compaq Aero etc), set-top boxes, cars (AutoPC), and mobile phones (Windows Mobile), as well as sewing machines, jukeboxes and other devices. It has even been used by Microsoft's rivals, such as Palm and Psion, without ever really taking off.
Stripped down
Whether computer appliances will succeed now is anybody's guess. JP Gownder of Forrester Research says that "in a world where many households own more than one PC, there's more scope for specialised PCs. For example, a home theatre PC will look like a stereo component. This type of PC exists today, but more will come - PCs built for specific settings and unique consumer segments. Whether these will be stripped down to 'appliances' is debatable, but I do believe PCs will evolve beyond just 'laptop and desktop' into a much wider panoply of form factors."
Whether or not the devices are appliances, it seems likely that the support functions will be. To get to the next billion users, the industry can't afford anything else.