The situations where the Net PC will be successful is where terminals are successful today in business; shop floor/warehouses/etc. In these situations you want something which runs just one application that the loaders/packers/whatever know how to use. No-one needs Word, Excel, email, Doom, or anything, just the Inventory Control application (and possibility with a touch-screen display -- no keyboard).
Clearly, today, I couldn't do my job accross the web because Word (or any other decent word proc) isn't available like that. As you say, Java applets (known as 'craplets') have some way to go. Not to mention local storage for when the network goes down.
And finally, since the NetPCs tend to have no local hard drive, there isn't any caching of data, so it's sloooow. I think these will flop unless the price drops to 'a few hundred', and then they'll appear in libraries, coffee shops, shopping malls etc.
Richard |
