Are Netbook ready to be served on a
silver platter to the enterprise?
(Image credit: Ars Technica)
Are netbooks ready for business use? Colleague and friend, James Gaskin, writing in Network World, recently considered whether these oh-so-popular netbooks are becoming an enterprise business staple or remain essentially a consumer-only product. He offers five reasons that netbooks could be considered for enterprises, along with five reasons that they may not be precisely what the doctor ordered.
Among his five pros, James Gaskin cited portability, extended battery life, low price, easy access to applications, and the netbook’s value as a loaner PC. For his five cons, he cited the fact that netbooks tend to be underpowered, they are weak in Biometric Security, small in size, having no internal optical drive and come with an installed Operating System that isn’t enterprise ready.
James has done well in highlighting the major pros and cons of netbooks for the enterprise. I tend to agree with his assessment. Portability is a big pro. Given the choice of carrying a five and a half pound 15” MacBook Pro or my 2.6 pound 10.2” MSI Wind U123 netbook to a meeting across town, at less than half the weight, the MSI Wind wins hands down. Plus it can easily fit in my briefcase whereas the MacBook Pro requires a carry case that screams out, “Hey, look here! This guy has an expensive laptop on his shoulder!”
With its superb battery life, I don’t need to worry about charging the MSI Wind netbook quite so often. Yet it does most everything that my MacBook Pro does except that it does it in a Windows kind of way. And therein lays the rub.
The rub is not so much about Windows per se as it is about a specific flavor of Windows—Windows XP Home. As James Gaskin has pointed out, Windows XP Home today and Windows 7 Starter Edition tomorrow, don’t fare particularly well in the enterprise. Their security is somewhat less than robust and they don’t play well with directory services. I know that our Desktop Support folks grimace when I attempt to connect my netbook to the corporate network—and I don’t blame them. To me, of all the cons that James Gaskin has cited, this is the Achilles heel of netbooks running Windows.
And the pity is that this doesn’t have to be such an issue. In fact, this is rarely a problem with netbooks running a variant of Linux like Ubuntu. They come with fully developed security features and the ability to play just fine on the corporate network with most any server, or client. So why did the folks in Redmond decide to handicap their Windows XP Home and Windows 7 Starter Edition Operating Systems in such a critical manner on netbooks? It makes no sense what-so-ever.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous column, in order to be accepted in the enterprise some business netbooks will need to be upgraded (at an additional cost) to a more robust version of Windows 7. If this limitation was removed by Microsoft in Windows 7 Starter Edition, or if netbooks came with a more robust version of Windows 7, James Gaskin’s netbook enterprise equation would immediately change to five pros and only four cons. And we know that majority rules!
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