Eric Schmidt reanimates el cheapo PC zombie
Fail and You Last week, Eric Schmidt ran his mouth off again at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. Schmidt commented that one of the new business models in the pipe for internet businesses is giving out free or subsidized computers to users and stacking paper on the ad revenue.
He didn't actually this is something Google or its partners would be pursuing. He was completely noncommittal about the whole thing, because, ya know, he didn't want to be blamed if the idea turned out to be a colossal fuck-up, just as it's been every other time somebody has tried it.
Schmidt insisted that "cloud computing is one of those changes that's going to happen...whether or not companies want it to." That's a pretty lofty statement for a company that has failed to make any substantial money from cloud hosted apps. But still, let's overlook that for the time being. The idea that service providers are again going to start handing out cheapo machines to users, bringing back from the dead the business models behind PeoplePC, eMachines, and to a certain extent NetZero, is worrisome.
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