How about the corporate intranet (no, you don't need an internet connection 40 hours a week to do word processing, your corporate LAN will do just fine)? Administration of several thousand (or hundred, or ten) Wintel PCs in a corporate environment is an administrator's nightmare. I have had reasonably intelligent users try to load Microsoft Golf (or anything else) on an optimally configured PC, have it suggest that more memory is needed - "Run MemMaker", and they do one of two things: 1. Ask for a new, bigger hard drive because the machine said they need more memory; or 2. Listen to the stupid box, run MemMaker, and completely destroy their ability to do any useful work (and they still can't play Golf!).
For all their talk about zero administration, Microsoft is really going nowhere with this. There are millions of corporate users with PCs on their desk who would be better served with a dumb terminal that gave them access to word processing, email, and corporate databases. Right now, since serial connections to a Unix server are too old fashioned, that means X-terminals, or to prevent Windows withdrawal, solutions like Citrix. The administrator can give everyone a controlled environment where they can run their apps (on the server) and not screw things up. The NC just extends this concept.
Who wins the server wars? Companies with scalable server architectures such as NUMA (the successor to SMP). Most of the major hardware vendors are going in this direction (Sequent, Sun, SGI, HP...). Who else wins? Software companies with database software that scales with these machines (Oracle), and the providers of the thin clients (also Oracle, surprise, surprise).
Sure, I have souped-up my old Northgate 386/33 to give to my kids. It requires less time to keep it up and running than my 486 or Pentium Pro-200. To tell the truth, I'd rather turn one of the boxes into a server and just give the kids a "dumb terminal". I wired the house for ethernet when I moved in 3 years ago. I suppose I should start using it.
-Michael |
