In its original incarnation circa 1996, the concept for a Network Computer (NC) did not really make sense. It offered a fraction of the functionality provided by a regular Personal Computer (PC), at a similar purchase price. But most importantly, nobody really cared. The web was just starting and the promoters of this new platform (Oracle and Sun Microsystems) found it difficult to make a case for it, beyond their common distaste for anything Microsoft. Today, the man who brought us eMachines is having another run at it, and this time around, it seems to be working out a lot better.

Stephen Dukker is Chairman of NComputing and was featured in the last edition of BusinessWeek. Stephen’s company has developed the NStation, a network-based computing terminal that supports WoIP (Windows over IP) and LoIP (Linux over IP) through a proprietary SoC (System on Chip). In a nutshell, it allows multiple users to share computing resources (CPU, Memory, HDD, etc.) that are provided by a single PC over the network. Priced at $249 without display, the system is still quite expensive, but it did not prevent NComputing to sell 100,000 of them since 2004. Moving forward, retail price is expected to drop below $100. Add a flat panel display, a keyboard and a mouse, and you get a fully working computer for less than $200, without mail-in rebate to worry about.

What I find interesting in this approach is that if you combine it with an Office 2.0 setup, you pretty much get a fully-featured office productivity environment that costs less than $200 per setup to acquire and costs virtually nothing to own. No viruses to worry about, no software to install or upgrade, no hard drives to backup. If I was working as IT manager for a school, this would seem like a pretty good deal to me.

Now, let’s push this scenario a step further. Let’s assume that schools around the world do the maths the same way — and maths in the U.S. are pretty much the same as they are in Europe or Asia — and start deploying such solutions. Before you know it, contingents of high school kids and college students will be doing most of their work using Office 2.0 applications. And when they get a job, they’ll start sharing their experience with corporate folks, converting Office 1.0 users faster than any marketing campaign could.

What this means is this: if you’re trying to sell Office 2.0, start with schools!