Digital Home Thoughts: Want to Run an App? There's a Router for that!

"The Linksys EA4500, EA3500, and EA2700 -- the "A" designation being short for "app-enabled" -- look like models in the earlier E Series but have more-powerful hardware and support Cisco Connect Cloud, the next generation of Cisco Connect software. The EA4500, for example, looks exactly the same as the original Linksys E4200, but the differences inside are significant."

While I love the idea of apps for a home router, I do not know if it will find much success. Apps for home server type machines have been tried before. Windows Home Server offers apps. Various other NAS devices also offer the ability for apps. None of them have found any significant success. I think the primary reason for this is that while there are benefits to hosting your own apps, most people have taken to the cloud as their main computing resource. With people being so mobile these days, why have something at your home base that you have to maintain when the cloud can do it? I certainly see value, and do run a lot of server like apps out of my home, but I do not think it will appeal to most people.