The thing that is coming is the ubiquitous computer. The way to make a business out of it is not to think, ooh 9 computers in the house - each with a monitor, a keyboard, yada-yada, but to embrace the fact that we have too much processing power. If you use a PC you only get 100% loading for a fraction of the time. Stick a linux PC on your central heating system, your oven, your video, etc, etc. Make it accessible to a structured e-mail, your home page, SMS messages and then you can set the video from work, from the back room etc. Pile on the processing, have a box in every room playing music web-casted from your livingroom to your home domain. Mix your interfaces - why would you need a monitor, mouse and keyboard for your central heating, access it's web page from one of your 9 linux systems with a keyboard and screen... The man that fixes your computers should be a plumber! The appeal of Linux is not paying hundreds of licences for one household full of computers, the down side is that all PCs should be as easy to use as a Mac. Users use, plumbers plumb. The next computing paradigm will be ubiquity, computers everywhere, and the cost structure (ie free please) will drive the OS market for the ubiquitous chip. Your main machine will be a state of the art chip, good graphics, blah-blah, but the ubiquitous ones will be so-called 'obsolete' technology... (so-called cos anyone that minds BBC Micros and ZX81s can never think of a 386 as useless...). What I am saying really is that producing cheap machines for use as computers is not the answer, thinking of what these cheap computers are going to do for users (normal people, slashen dotten niene danke...) is the problem. How to use them without peripherals, how to access them remotely, how to boot them off your local network, how to keep the cost down, down, down and how to make them plumber-friendly and user-invisible are the tasks... That's my tuppence... I gotta getta new job and my mind turns to these things a lot too....