disruptive innovation

Neil McIntosh loves his little new Eee: "Don’t you just love the sound of.. er… paradigms being shifted in the morning?"

I've written previously about the significance of disruptive, low-end products in general, and Linux for consumers in particular. And I've noted that my kids, my mother, and my mother-in-law are all running Linux.

As McIntosh notes, it's the network, not the computer, that counts. As prices continue to drop, as open-source tools displace expensive proprietary systems, as Moore's Law and miniaturization continue to put more and more power into the hands of more and more people, the so-called digital divide just fades away.