Watch List: The Best 3 Month Buy
Netscape (NSCP) is probably one of the best 3 month buys around. They have announced their intent to release Gemini in a couple of months. Gemini is a low level rendering engine that can be extended at run-time, making it easy to add Web-browsing capability to virtually any application. It is to be implemented as a JavaBean and possibly as an ActiveX control. What this means is that it can display any document type, and can be used by almost all browsers, including Internet Explorer. Rather than serving documents to client software with fixed capabilities (such as resident plug-ins, Java capabilities, ActiveX controls, etc.), it can be served along with the code to view them. In essence, it removes the significance of the browser from the whole equation. More importantly, the vast arena of corporate intranets will now have the ability to push specific documents, like CAD formatted drawings, statistical data sets, etc. Without the enormous cost of buying application-specific viewer software for each user for each application. To give you an idea of the cost of those, for the average CAD graphic viewers on a PC, the per-seat license is $1,000 per year as opposed to a $25,000 software license for a Unix workstation license. A company with only a hundred people wishing to view CAD drawings is looking at a substantial outlay. The Gemini construct means anyone can use it at a fraction of this cost, as well as look at anyone else's documents regardless of their PC's software. It also means platform independence for web users (ever get an attachment meant for Wordperfect and you have to convert, or get a Mac document and you run a PC?). This is big bucks, and it fits elegantly within Netscape's Enterprise, Intranet and Extranet strategy as well as Internet support. This ends the debate over which browser and which functionality du jour is required via plugins or Java applets or controls.
lastshadow
ps - Thanks for all the `get well' notes for my brother. He is doing good. |
