I'd really like to see someone turn a cruise ship into a moving, floating tech city that would move about the world (possibly spending a week in each port, allowing inland travel) so people can travel but also have a stable support network. It'd even have a school for people with kids. It'd probably be cheaper than living in New York or the Bay Area.
ResidenSea did this, but it was priced at a point where only the super rich could afford it, and those people were so rich that they treated it as a part-time vacation residence.
I've looked at this (from even the mid-1990s), and it's really hard to make the economics work. Ships are expensive, both in capital costs and especially in operations costs. You can buy used ships, but they're never very efficient or suitable, and retrofitting them is expensive.
People who would be comfortable living out of a tiny cabin with limited services are almost always better off just renting a place on land for a period of time and flying in between destinations. It's only if you need a large, constant space that it makes sense, and doing that with a ship is expensive.
There's also a horrible scale problem -- you could maybe make this work on a per-user cost with a $10b world's largest ship, but a $100mm ship is probably 10x less efficient, and a $1mm boat is another 10-50x less efficient.
There's also the loss of freedom with a large ship. I'd rather just make enough to buy a $5-10mm boat of my own (or, ideally, $100-200mm), and have some guests sometimes, vs. try to coordinate when people get on or off or where it goes as a collective.
There's the regular cruise ship industry on the low end as competition, too. You can get deals and just book 90 days on cruise ships if you want, and get the scale advantages of a large ship; the downside is boredom and being around a bunch of old people (usually) or sometimes drunk college students. Block-booking (how most "gay cruises" or other special interests are done) works. Geekcruises did some of this.
What might make sense is a bunch of ships going on a specific route, with transferability across them, or big fixed platforms at sea where people can go to/from by air, boats, or bigger ships. Of course, now you're looking at many billions of dollars in capital and a very large minimum scale; it's really hard to be incremental in this market.
I went and lived for 2 years in France with my wife and 8yr old step daughter.
Recently I also took my kids to Kathmandu for a couple of weeks and mixed working with holidaying - so it's definitely possible. Of course in almost every major city in the world there are plenty of expat families raising kids successfully.
I guess you need to decide how nomadic you wish to be. Personally I think it's nice for kids to feel like they have some kind of home base so I'm more in favour of longer stints in places (e.g. not moving every 3 months) but that is only based on a hunch, and also depends so much on the personalities in your family.
Plenty of people live aboard and travel via the ocean. Not sure how many are in the tech field (one comes to mind: the MicroStrategy CEO - Michael Saylor.. from what I understand, the guy lives aboard some massive ship and travels the globe that way). No idea on family lifestyle, but I suspect having kids would be much more difficult with that setup.
There's Blueseed (http://blueseed.co/) and recently, I read about a planned kind of entrepreneur cruise (I can't find that one right now, perhaps it's organised by Blueseed as well). Neither is intended for families, but in the long run, they might offer that.
I'd really like to see someone turn a cruise ship into a moving, floating tech city that would move about the world (possibly spending a week in each port, allowing inland travel) so people can travel but also have a stable support network. It'd even have a school for people with kids. It'd probably be cheaper than living in New York or the Bay Area.