Who cares? You should, and here's why: marketing. If reps give me garbage, there's a very good chance I'll pass that garbage on to you, and you're supposed to trust the information I provide. If a PR rep tells me their new gadget is going to change the world and I relay this to you, you're going to be pretty disappointed when you buy it and discover it sucks. This is why I hate marketing. It's a game: How do you make crap look beautiful? Just give it a new name, double the price, make some flashy ads, and sell, SELL, SELL!

I wanted to write an article about Web appliances, right? You hear about them all the time – simple little gizmos that put you on the Web without all the baggage of a PC. I could read my morning e-mail from the kitchen. With one on the coffee table, I could do research while my wife watches "Dharma and Greg." Sweet.

So I started my hunt for Web appliances and discovered this fabulous-sounding product called the VBOX (www.v4me.com), billed as "the world's first all-in-one Home Theater PC" for only $299. Cool! What's it do? It's a combo DVD/MP3/Dolby Pro Logic/gaming/Internet surfin' extravaganza, ladies and gents! Plug it into your TV and go! Then I saw the picture. Hey, wait a minute. That looks like a desktop PC turned on its side. Upon closer inspection, that's exactly what it turned out to be – a 400MHz Celeron PC with Windows 98, 64MB of PC100 RAM, and a 4.3GB hard drive, built around Intel's 810 chipset (which offers most of the peripheral features, including S-Video output). The price is obtained only after mail-in rebates, dependent on a three-year contract with Microsoft's ISP service.

Marketing, baby. Take two, they're cheap.

While still scraping this revelation off my shoes, I found two other devices, Netpliance's i-opener (whose ads you might have caught during the Superbowl) and Merinta's iBrow. Now, these are what I would really call an appliance. They're essentially a keyboard and a 10" passive matrix display running on a non-Windows OS. Plug a phone line in the back and – bam! You're on the Web. Both have function buttons for things like e-mail, Web search, and weather. The i-opener even has a pizza button which will whisk you to Papa John's home delivery website.

In form and function, the two machines are virtually identical. However, the iBrow costs $200 more. Why? Because it's targeted at a corporate audience while the i-opener (which had been $199 until the Superbowl) aims directly at Joe Sixpack. This struck me as terribly unjust, so I spoke with reps at both companies to make sure I understood the whole picture. The i-opener, along with its AOL-priced $21.95 per month service, seeks to snare the remaining 50 percent of American users who feel too threatened by PCs to purchase one and get online.

The iBrow comes with one year of free ISP service (actually making it cheaper after 12 months), but the marketing is entirely different. Merinta sells the units to large companies, which in turn put their sticker on the bezel and customize the interface to take users to their website upon start-up. These modified machines are then given away to key clients as a loyalty booster. Virgin Megastores recently contracted for 10,000 iBrows, soon to be distributed under the name "Webplayer."

Now, I am not a billboard. In general, I refuse to even wear shirts with a vendor's name on it. If somebody handed me a Web appliance that forced me to have an advertisement for a home page, I wouldn't touch it. (Then again, I'm not desperate for cheap Web access.) But even worse, the marketing slant made no sense to me. Corporate users don't need Web appliances. They've already got Net-enabled home PCs and offices full of workstations connected by Ethernet.

I called Merinta and talked with a PR rep. (I later found out that she studies Buddhism and teaches yoga, and I really dig that, so I'm not going to mention her name, OK?) Admittedly, she'd only been with Merinta for four weeks, and I don't think she'd yet encountered anyone as abrasive as me.

I started with an easy question: "So who is your target customer?"

"Well, much of the corporate sector, but especially financial service companies. They would give these away to their top clients that cost a lot to attain and retain. Essentially, it's one-to-one marketing."

I really liked this lady's voice, but I had to go for the kill. "So the iBrow is a promotional item?"

"Yes, it's definitely a promotional item."

"You're telling me this is a $500 coffee mug?"

"Well...!" She paused. "It's got more...!" She paused again. I felt terrible. OK, not really. "I definitely think you could argue that one down, because look at a mug. You drink out of a mug. That's all you can do with it. There's about ten-million more things you can do with the Internet and iBrow."

Please.

Netpliance, on the other hand, has a great game plan, if you ask me. I spoke with Munira Fareed, the company's Director of Product Marketing, and asked about i-opener's strategy and demographic targets.

"Last quarter, almost half of the people who bought were buying it for their parents," Fareed explained. "Interestingly enough, these buyers were tech-savvy people. They had a PC and Internet access at home. And I'd say 60 or 65 percent of them were men. So what's happening is this phenomenon where people like you and I who are comfortable with technology are trying to get others in the family into the game. Like last week when my sister called. She was complaining that I hadn't called her back. She'd called three weeks ago. And I said, 'You know... why don't you just e-mail me?' This is the phenomenon in our society that's happening."

In all my research, this stands as the best description I've heard on why Web appliances will succeed. It's a simplicity thing, not a convenience thing. Here's why I believe this:

Netpliance all but lobbed an i-opener at me to evaluate, a generous offer that did not bias my opinion of the product. When the box arrived, I had my generally non-technical wife set it up and timed her to see how long it took before she was on the Web. With a bad headache, it took her ten minutes. That's persuasive. The i-opener arrived pre-programmed to know my physical location, allowing it to select the appropriate dial-up number and optimize several features (such as weather data) for my region. You turn the thing on, wait a minute for it to update, and you're hangin' ten on the Infobahn. We have it sitting in the corner on a kitchen counter, surrounded by dog biscuits and the mocha machine.

I've now had the i-opener running for over a week and have developed a good idea of my usage pattern. At 5:00 AM, I stumble downstairs, feed the dog, start my coffee, and use the i-opener to fetch my e-mail. If I used the e-mail account that came with the unit, the mail would already be sitting there waiting for me, just one click away. Instead, I have to log into My Yahoo! and fetch mail from my regular ISP through the back door, a process that takes two or three minutes and involves many steps. (Netpliance states that they should support external POP mail fetching in the future.) After getting my mail, I read through the morning's news headlines. Occasionally, I spot an article I want to send to my regular e-mail account, but i-opener doesn't support this (yet). By now, my coffee and cereal are ready. Before i-opener, I would leisurely consume breakfast on the couch, reading a book or magazine. Now, I screw around at Amazon.com, adding items to my Wish List, wasting a lot of time in the process.

In the evening, if my wife and I make dinner together, I'll check my e-mail again and do some Web searching on whatever recent topic we've been discussing. The other night, she wanted to show me her idea of a good Valentine's Day floral arrangement at FTD's site. Very subtle.

A Web appliance like i-opener is exactly what a technophobic novice like my dad needs. I've tried for years to get him online with a regular PC, all to no avail.

For me, as a "power user," my feelings are mixed. My connection is often inexplicably dropped. I can't view attachments or QuickTime videos. The ergonomics of trying to type on a kitchen counter are horrendous. The conclusion I'm left with is that i-opener and its ilk are great first attempts at Web appliances, but there's still a long development road before true usability is achieved.

Here's my vision of a real Web appliance: Ditch the keyboard. Input needs to be done either with a stylus on a touch-sensitive screen or by speech recognition, and preferably by both. (Don't even think about on-screen keyboards. They'll make you homicidal.) The device is a pad, small and light enough to sit comfortably on your lap or under your arm. Snap it into a wall-mounted cradle, and not only will it show artistic screen-saver art to decorate your home but, when in use, it directly cables into your home network. This allows you full-speed broadband access to the Web as well as the ability to use spare processing power (via distributed computing) from other PCs on your network. When out of the cradle, it can still function as a remote extension of this network, only communicating by a lower-bandwidth radio technique like Bluetooth. Take the pad outside the house and you cross over into digital cellular networks, although it can still communicate with other nearby devices, such as your car, PDA, or cell phone. (Actually, with an optional earpiece accessory, such a pad could often replace a cell phone.)

I think the pad appliance will ultimately become the dominant-computing model in the home, right alongside the traditional desktop PC. What really scares me, though, is that Merinta might be the opening shot in a whole new advertising barrage. Once the right appliance design is figured out and made affordable, the marketers will descend like locusts. Independent appliances will be forced off the market by "free" branded units.

Of course, this shouldn't bother you if two conditions apply: 1) you don't mind being bombarded by advertising and psychologically browbeaten into opening your wallet, and 2) you don't mind being a billboard.

February 2000