I am old enough to remember some really educated and experienced people who said home computers would never happen. They were speaking during the days when computers took up half a room, used enough electricity to serve a small town, and were horrendously expensive. Their opinions were based on the computers they were currently using, but those opinions persevered even when computers were getting smaller and cheaper.
Then along came some more clever people who by that time may not have known much about large house sized computers, but who were not too influenced by the constraints of the past. Their expertise was in knowing know how to produce, market and sell home computers. The rest is history.
Most of the arguments made about home servers are similarly given by highly educated and experienced users of current commercial servers, the sort that use up a lot of electricity, and which generate a lot of noise and heat, and cost a lot to buy and to use. The comparisons are very similar.
A personal server, as opposed to a commercial server, doesn’t need to be either noisy, hot, expensive to buy or expensive to use, and I’ve written elsewhere (link below) about the business opportunities for selling home servers that are cheap to buy and cheap to run, ready to plug in, and which already contain Solid Pod server software.
If you buy a computer these days, or a phone, you don’t buy the hardware and then try to work out how to compile the software. You buy the hardware with the software already installed. You turn it on, log in, and away you go. I think that servers will be sold the same way in the future, and that Solid will hasten that day coming.
The link below is to a previous post I’ve written about my own experience of hosting a Solid Pod server on an inexpensive £50 Raspberry Pi, and the commercial opportunities of creating and selling Pi’s preloaded with a Solid Server.