You accurately point out some of the reasons why the PC has not lived up to its expectations in the mass market.
In the past, other than word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and checkbook balancing, there haven't been too many good reasons to spend $2000 on PC. Games? I can still do better on a Nintendo. Perhaps some of The 30% of US consumers (20% worldwide) who have bought PC's have better uses. But maybe you're right - this market of sophisticated computer users may well be saturated.
But what about the other 70%? Is that market really saturated? In the past perhaps the 70% may not have been compelled to buy PCs because the cost/benefit wasn't there for them. But the internet changes everything. The benefits are greater and the costs are much less. You don't need a $2K white elephant to surf the web and send e-mails. And with some bandwidth, you'll be able to do a bunch of other things over the multi-everything internet that we, our perspectives limited by single-user PC, can't even imagine yet. Mr. Gates has wanted this group all to himself, but the NC, at $200 (man, that's just twice as much as my Win95 upgrade!!), will provide some stiff competition. Gates may still get some of these folks, but he'll sure have to slash his margins.
Now how about that group among the 30% who are, as you suggest, "tired of having to sort it all out over and over and over again" every time Wintel says jump. They may not want to buy an NC, but they're not likely to buy into Gates' game either. THese consumers will further fuel the network computing momentum because they will look more and more to the internet to meet their information needs (with browsers running off their junky 486 machines) rather than high-powered new Dells. The net will not obsolete your hardware as fast as local softare will.
Watch the corporate world. That's where Sun and Oracle will go first. The NC has raised a lot of attention with these marketing heavyweights pushing things along. Imagine what will happen after some of the early adopters (who are right now busy deploying NC's to their less power-hungry users) start demonstrating dramatically reduced total costs of ownership without sacrificing productivity.
There's much, much more to the NC than hype. |
