Axioms

1. Increasingly, people have multiple PCs in their homes
2. Most people use barely a fraction of the power of their PCs
3. While desktop computers are increasingly cheap, everyone likes cheaper
4. Wireless network communication has come of age
5. No one will ever relinquish having their processing power on their own property - web computing is not the future.

Prediction

A home server, wirelessly connected directly to monitor, mouse, keyboard, and other required peripherals is the future of home computing.

For the price of 4 machines, one could have a much more powerful single home server, the power of which could be dedicated to one "client" while other machines were not using it. Alternatively even today a regular desktop machine could easily manage multiple clients performing non-resource hungry tasks such as word processing, web browsing and email, which is all many people do on their machines.

At the moment the computing industry is taking a leaf from the restaurant business. You'd never pay $30 for a normal sized meal, so they put 3 portions on your plate. You'd never pay $1,000 for the machine you actually need to just check your email and browse the web, so they sell you a machine that could damn near run NASA Space Shuttle Control.

Maybe this wasn't a prediction as such. It's not profitable enough for the industry. But it's how things should be. Home servers and thin clients are the smart approach to home computing for homes with multiple desktops.


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I'd like to have one of those!