"Consumers are always going to have a mix of crap," Tim Dowling, CEO of Pure Networks said to me during a lunch meeting a few weeks ago. His company is making a product called Network Magic. It's network management software for the home. It's supposed to make it easy for a consumer to manage a home router and all the "crap" attached to it -- computers, printers, shared storage, and so on. It should make sharing files among computers easier, for one thing.
I'm thinking about covering this company's prospects in an upcoming column. But while this is one of those products that I think I could really use myself, I've talked to several people about it and I just can't get them interested in it. I fear the product is either too geeky for consumers who are afraid of networking; or too simple for geeks who already have their networks under control.
