Windows Home Server Will Achieve Limited Adoption
Posted on February 20, 2007
I don’t believe that Microsoft’s recently announced Windows Home Server (WHS) product will achieve wide adoption among the product’s target audience. Announced by Bill Gates at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January,
Windows Home Server will help families with multiple PCs connect their home computers, digital devices and printers, in order to easily store, protect and share their treasured photos, music, videos and documents. By automatically backing up home PCs, centralizing a family’s digital “stuff” and allowing access to it away from home, Windows Home Server will help simplify and enhance family life.
I expect the product to see great uptake among technology enthusiasts but I don’t think it will be pervasive with the typical Internet family. Reasons include:
- People don’t think of themselves as running support operations. (Credit for this bullet comes from colleague and friend The Derf.) When it comes to people’s computers, they just want them to work and they expect their data to be safe. Unlike things like printers and scanners (and even WiFi) which provide direct and obvious utility, WHS is a pure infrastructure device and therefore won’t be recognized as essential.
- For PC and consumer electronics products to be widely adopted I believe they must either fill an obvious gap (I don’t think the gap is obvious here since most people don’t think about things like backup) or they must significantly improve the user experience. For example, WiFi allows you to sit out on the deck and browse the Internet. Photo printers give you the instant gratification of passing around just-taken digital photos. So what about appliances that backup PCs? Wait, doesn’t that just happen automatically*?
Paul Thurrott covers the product and states Microsoft’s objectives towards ease of use in his preview of WHS at the SuperSite for Windows. It’s an interesting opposing view.
* Microsoft seems to recognize how important (and generally missing) consumer PC backups are. (Backup is a primary function of WHS). As such, I’d like to see Microsoft implement an Internet-based backup offering as part of Windows Live OneCare which could be integrated with Windows Vista and XP. I think Vista should present users with an in-your-face prompt to back up their data to OneCare following new PC setup. Including this functionality in Vista could spread the protection of PC backup to the 90 million+ units of Vista that IDC estimates will ship in 2007. Note: If you are interested in Internet-based backup for your Windows machine today, check out Mozy and Carbonite, which are very good and inexpensive. The Webware blog has a post on some other services as well.
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