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It's All The Net (4/6/98)
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Here's the scenario, hot-shot: You're a multi-billion-dollar computer manufacturer with a veritable lock on the educational market, when suddenly (say, over the course of, oh, several years) you make six or eight really serious mistakes and you find yourself losing that market steadily to the competition. What do you do? Not an easy question, but if Mac OS Rumors is correct, Apple may just have found one heckuva good strategy. One word: "Network Booting." (Well, okay, that's two words, but let's not get snippy.)
According to Rumors, it's possible that all Macs built by Apple as of this autumn will have the capability to boot up via a networked server. Basically, that means you can have a Mac with no hard drive that still boots, runs applications, stores files, and just generally functions fine entirely by accessing a Rhapsody server via a network connection. You know, that whole NC idea-- except regular Macs will be able to do this, too, even though they will also have the ability to boot normally from their local hard disks. If that doesn't sound particularly interesting to you, it's likely because you've most likely never tried to administrate (hmm, is that a word? It is now.) a cluster of computers being used by several people. Believe us-- installing the Mac OS 8.1 upgrade on thirty machines is not fun. Installing it only on one (but having it take effect on thirty machines) is a much nicer scenario.
So, if we were running a school computer lab, we know which scenario we'd pick, especially given how many local hard disks we also see fail in the field. And in fact, this paradigm sounds nifty for the business environment as well, for all the same reasons: simpler administration, easy-to-track licensing, fast upgrades, less ground to cover, and less to go wrong on the user end. And since the net-booted computers would all be Macs, there's no question of ease of use. This could be a recipe for success-- let's see if Apple pulls it off (or even tries).
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SceneLink (603)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/6/98 episode: April 6, 1998: Laughing boy Steve Jobs woos the NAB, and manages to sound both charming and desperate in the same breath. Meanwhile, back in the labs, Apple may be working on a nifty new standard feature that will make Macs more popular in educational and corporate environments, and the Department of Justice inches ever closer to its next lawsuit against Big Brother Microsoft...
Other scenes from that episode: 602: I Want My QTTV (4/6/98) "We're dying to work with you." That's the message Steve Jobs gave to the National Association of Broadcasters today, as he delivered his keynote address at their convention. The inimitable Mr. Jobs made his best pitch for broadcasters to embrace Quicktime as the basis for their continuing transition from analog to digital video signals... 604: Redmond Justice, Round 2 (4/6/98) It's finally coming-- the second round of government-filed antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft. And the first round isn't even close to being finished yet. A Reuters story claims that the Department of Justice believes it's got enough evidence to build a new case by the end of this month. The legalspeak at the center of the expected case is "illegal maintenance and extension" of Microsoft's de-facto monopoly on operating system software...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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