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Here's the scenario, hot-shot: You're a multi-billion-dollar computer manufacturer with a veritable lock on the educational market, when suddenly (say, over the course of, oh, several years) you make six or eight really serious mistakes and you find yourself losing that market steadily to the competition. What do you do? Not an easy question, but if Mac OS Rumors is correct, Apple may just have found one heckuva good strategy. One word: "Network Booting." (Well, okay, that's two words, but let's not get snippy.)
According to Rumors, it's possible that all Macs built by Apple as of this autumn will have the capability to boot up via a networked server. Basically, that means you can have a Mac with no hard drive that still boots, runs applications, stores files, and just generally functions fine entirely by accessing a Rhapsody server via a network connection. You know, that whole NC idea-- except regular Macs will be able to do this, too, even though they will also have the ability to boot normally from their local hard disks. If that doesn't sound particularly interesting to you, it's likely because you've most likely never tried to administrate (hmm, is that a word? It is now.) a cluster of computers being used by several people. Believe us-- installing the Mac OS 8.1 upgrade on thirty machines is not fun. Installing it only on one (but having it take effect on thirty machines) is a much nicer scenario.
So, if we were running a school computer lab, we know which scenario we'd pick, especially given how many local hard disks we also see fail in the field. And in fact, this paradigm sounds nifty for the business environment as well, for all the same reasons: simpler administration, easy-to-track licensing, fast upgrades, less ground to cover, and less to go wrong on the user end. And since the net-booted computers would all be Macs, there's no question of ease of use. This could be a recipe for success-- let's see if Apple pulls it off (or even tries).
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