Forbes reports on a plan by Google to rent laptops to students for $20 a month. The idea is that this is a testbed for potentially more lucrative corporate computer rentals, and helps potential future customers become more comfortable with life in the cloud. It's also, I would say, a way to get people used to the idea of paying for Google online applications. Vicki A. Davis raises a series of cautions about schools signing on for the service, mostly to do with privacy and lockdown and computing for young children. Also, bandwidth, which I think is the potential dealbreaker. Consider what happens today at tech conferences, where bandwidth breakdowns are routine. Unless Google figures out how to break the ISP logjam and offer bandwidth at commodity prices, cloud computing will remain in the future.
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