Sorry Reg, I did get a little carried away with the length of my previous post - but this is quite entertaining :-)
You and I clearly disagree on what we see as the main benefit TO THE MASS MARKET. You place value on the flexibility and power that local processing gives you, whereas I believe that the price for these "benefits" is extra money and especially time to deal with needless complexity that just gets in the way of what most people want: The ability to use the internet. This is in the short term. In the long term I see the vast majority of the things we do now on the fat client being off-loaded to the server/network anyway.
>>Just for the hell of it, lets see how inexpensively I can build a Win 95 machine
Apples to oranges. You're building it. People who have the time and inclination to build the machine are few and far between - not the mass market that has eluded Wintel to date. A WebTV is available NOW complete, fully supported, ready to go for $349. And this is only the starting point. Remember the VCR? And $99 for a full license of Win95? Gates and MSFT shareholders would not appreciate that.
>> As for support who knows, but the telcos in my area don't support my cellular phone either, so that point is irrelavant.
Cellular phones don't need much support. And neither will info appliances. Outsourcing support for a PC would be MUCH more expensive. I suppose the access providers can punt on support altogether if they decide to pass out Wintel boxes, but that would open them up to competitive pressures from others.
And if the disk crashes, you say...
>>Read the directions that came with the box, just like I did when I got started..
No one should ever have to even worry about disk crashes. The mere possibility that precious data can be wiped out is an unacceptable risk that the Network Computing model would address.
>>From a dollar perspective, more entities have too much to lose to allow the PC dominance to be circumvented.
It's not a loss, it's a farsighted investment. That's the beauty of open standards. Any new development can be delivered to the fat clients of today, but much more importantly, to the vastly greater number of thin clients in the future.
>>It would be very difficult for NSCP to build a browser-OS before MSFT that can compete. Windows CE is already out, and it is receiving acceptance.
Microsoft's dominance of full-featured client OS may never be challenged, but I don't see the market expanding as greatly as would've been the case before the WWW took off. Windows CE will need to be very inexpensive if it is to compete against the appliance/browser combo. This translates to diminished opportunities and greater development and support costs for MSFT. Also to compete Windows CE will need to be ported. It will not match the portability nor the universality of Netscape's client. |
