Linutop!

The Linutop looks incredible. It's a very small, low power, diskless, Linux desktop. Primarily meant to be a cheap web surfing platform, this could hit Microsoft in the fundament when partnered with web based office productivity applications already available.

I tried out Google Spreadsheets yesterday and it was surprisingly usable. It was slow, but certainly usable. I already use gmail as my main email system. At work we use BaseCamp. And almost all of our business systems (except Point of Sale systems, although we saw a very impressive demo of a web based point of sale system from Imperium technologies a few months ago.

For an increasingly web-based world, the Linutop is a great box. It's got a slow CPU in there and not a lot of RAM, so a year or two after launch, I wouldn't be surprised if the first iteration were to become very cheap and they would then be perfect as LTSP clients (which we also run at work, and which we will be pushing out slowly, one department at a time, so that maybe in ten years only 10% of our employees will still be in Windows).