>I had to chuckle at their "disaster-proof servers" - they make no attempt to address the most likely, and devastating disaster, namely that their company will fail financially.
>
>The data is actually stored in Amazon's S3 server farm, with the subscription included in the price. ;-)

How long do you think your data will be available, if Zonbu stops paying Amazon?

>
>FWIW, if you buy a similar deal directly from Amazon the price is about $13/month, so $14.95/month including hardware replacement insurance and automatically updated open source software does seem reasonable.
>
>Also FWIW, I just had a P4 configured as a playroom PC for my kids. It's agonizingly slow to change users and a certain 3-year old was caught flicking it on and off at the weekend. IMHO a $99 solid-state 10-watt device that can stay on all the time, with auto repairing software and parental control, may offer significant advantages in anybody's home. Especially since the device would be capable of running a fully-fledged VOIP PBX as well.

It does look aimed at kids/casual/non-sophisticated users. There could well be a substantial market. But, what happens when Mom wants to run Quickbooks, or use that neat Windows-only genealogy program? Or the kids get older and want to play Crysis or Bioshock?

>It'll be interesting to see how it goes. Ddid you check the reviews page? What drew my attention was the model of a cheap near-indestructible local device with 100% remote management and processing funded by subscription fees. IMHO that's the future for consumer computing.

Sun has been singing this tune, and variations on it for eons. They don't exactly rule the computing world.