Neverware Means Never Buying a New Computer Again
There is something odd about the computer Jonathan Hefter keeps at his desk in the Dogpatch Labs tech incubator just off of Union Square. The space is filled with employees from some of New York's most promising startups …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Observer's profile places Jonathan Hefter's Neverware inside Dogpatch Labs near Union Square, where the confirmed pitch is simple: technology that lets people keep using their existing computers instead of buying new ones. That puts it squarely in a lineage the New York Times has been tracking for years — the revived interest in dumb terminals tied back to a central server reported in 2008, and earlier writing on networked, shared computing from 2006.
First-order effects
- Owners of aging PCs — the customers Neverware targets — gain an alternative to the standard hardware refresh cycle, stretching the useful life of machines they already own.
Second-order effects
- PC manufacturers and resellers whose volumes depend on replacement purchases face pressure at exactly the low end of the market where an old machine is most tempting to keep alive.
- IT buyers weighing a fleet upgrade can benchmark Neverware-style life-extension against new hardware pricing, sharpening the cost case against routine refreshes.
Third-order effects
- If the model holds, computing shifts further toward centralized architectures of the kind the 2008 smart-monitor coverage described — processing done elsewhere, old boxes kept as windows into it — reversing decades of ever-faster client-side obsolescence.
The trend: Client computing is drifting back toward server-centered models that decouple what a computer can do from how new its hardware is.