Doc says that I’m being a bit hard on Apple and Microsoft, both of whom sell similar applications to the home server idea.
That’s true – but they’re not very heavily encouraged among home users. The very fact that I can’t work out a way of explaining how to do this to Sunday Times readers is an indication of that. Running a PHP Webmail app, or a home iDisk, for instance, really isn’t rocket science: it just doesn’t fit either of these companies current business models.
One of the real albatrosses around the symmetrical net for now is that the principal big server apps for the computers on the edge of the Network is still file-sharing. Telcos feel they can legitimately complain about “bandwidth abuse” when it’s conducted by suspected copyright criminals. As Doc says, they’d find it a little harder to moan if it was baby photo album sharing.
(I’m beginning to see the big hole in both Apple and Microsoft’s thinking. Microsoft treats its customers as though they were businesses. Apple treats them as though they were consumers. What if we’re neither?)