We need Thin Clients.

I am a volunteer supporting a Linux thin client lab in a school in San Francisco. I believe that there is a business model for Dell in providing commodity hardware at a very cheap price and then charging monthly maintenance fees which would be administered remotely. I know that I personally would offer free marketing and promotion for such a system, as I am an open source evangelist who donates time to promoting Linux and open source in schools.

I can tell you that we have paid for such a thin client lab in San Francisco, but the school has bought into the monthly support angle just yet, probably because the company who provided it charged too much for the support (I can't say the price because that would kind of be rude to publish this guy's price sheet here in this public space).

Part of Dell's agreement for the support would be that the customers who have to bring problem machines to a designated center in each city, where the vanilla, commodity, re-used hardware would simply be parted out or trouble shooted by a volunteer. These centers would essentially be an organization like FreeGeek.org, in Portland, which provides hardware to volunteers. Dell could get a tax write-off for supporting FreeGeek.org, and FreeGeek.org would do the costly work of organizing the volunteers, train the volunteers, etc. So that would get around the problem of triaging and swapping out the hardware.

Each school would be responsible for providing its own on-site level one tech support person. That person would do the grunt work of hard re-boots, checking the wiring, and similar stuff. Dell would be paid to send out an initial team to set up the lab; Dell would get a monthly maintenance support fee for supporting that on-site level one tech support worker; and Dell would also provide x number of hours of remote trouble shooting via tunneling to the local site. Dell could supplement this service by supporting a wiki or a forum and offering that service to local LUGs in terms of free hosting for such sites. See below for more partnership ideas with LUGs.

Dell would get low-cost promotion by contacting local Linux user groups and informing those groups of Dell's LTSP services. This would dramatically reduce Dell's sales costs.

Dell could also source the initial install fee to local Linux user groups (LUGs) who would assign jobs on a rotational basis, or the LUGs would provide Dell with a list of names of people who wanted to supplement their income by doing the initial installs. Dell could maintain a rotation list, and it could allow members of the LUG to vote people off of the list if they did shoddy work. As a benefit to the LUG, Dell could hold annual trainings for free. The trainings would targeted to members of schools and churches, which would increase attendence in the local LUGs.

Dell could also offer a supported Debian pool, such as Linspire's marvelous CNR (Click N Run) service. As updates happen, Dell could just push the updates downstream to subscribers of the update and maintenance service.

To summarize, Dell would monetize Linux and open source software by
1) selling vanilla commodity hardware through local Linux User Groups (LUGS);
2) contracting out LTSP installs of that vanilla commodity hardware through FreeGeek.org type of institutions
3) requiring customers to sign up for remote tunneling maintenance and support tickets, augmented by
4) paid support incidents that were beyond the skills of the local LUG members.
5) requiring customers to patronize local FreeGeek.org institutions which Dell would partially fund by returning troubled hardware there for a cheap exchange of hardware (we're talking a couple of dollars).

In true Dell fashion, Dell would mostly be buidling the infrastructure to aggregate players, and Dell would not be sinking lots of money into real world infrastructure.

Christian Einfeldt
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point

These days, most of the home computers are used for
1. Browsing the internet
2. Office applications
3. E-mail
4. Instant Messenger
5. VOIP (Up to some extent)

Bring a new product, what I call thin PC with no hard drive; lot of RAM and with an embedded micro OS and a web browser. Provide plenty of USB ports for future expansion. (Like adding a Hard Disk, Optical Drive etc..)

With web application like Google Apps around, this will suffice most of day-to-day requirements.

Advantages of this approach are
1. Instant boot
2. No software upgrades required
3. Less expensive
4. No virus attacks

This can attract lots of customers in developing world.

Develop and market a total thin client system (from thin client to server) that uses standard hardware, and allows the IT department to purchase the just components of the system or the whole package deal. This should be capable of running Linux Desktop and X or MS Windows based terminal services.

This will help prevent migration from Dell desktop products to competitors like Neoware, and Wyse.

For education organizations supporting projects such as K12LTSP http://www.k12ltsp.org/ would benefit the bottom line for the schools and Dell. A Win-Win proposition.

For businesses and healthcare greater security and lower cost of future upgrades is a great benefit.

Dell should manufacture thin clients like Wyse & Neoware. Virtual desktop infrastructure or hosted desktop environments could reduce desktop sales in the business market. Manufacturing *LINUX* based thin clients that integrate well with connection brokers for virtual desktop (Leostream, Citrix, etc) could help make up for losses seen in the desktop realm. Dell could even get a bit more involved and produce their own free open source connection broker that works exceptionally well with their thin client and equally well with other manufactures thin clients. The broker should integrate well with VMware and XenSource virtualzation software. (If done, Dell should not brand the software with the Dell name. Establish a new community based software divison with a different name. Using the Dell name on the software would probably cause people to stay away from it if they werent using dell hardware. This is not what you want. This software could attract current HP thin client users to Dell. Access the resourse of the open source community when developing this software. Development cost should be minimal).

Since Microsoft improved Terminal Services it has become cheaper for Small Businesses who need more then five systems to implement a Terminal Services solution rather then the standard thick client network. Dell should manufacturer a thin client terminal, it could run Linux, CE, or Windows XP Embedded. It would also be great for Small Businesses that run web applications.

What about a ThinClient from DELL?