Hello All,
I wonder if anyone would care to comment on the following analysis of NC vs PC?
Currently a PC contains the following elements:
Monitor
Keyboard/Mouse
Motherboard
Network card/chips
Modem subsystem
Sound system
Infrastructure (case, power supply, etc)
Hard disk
Memory
For any given situation, both PC and NC would obviously require all of the elements above, excepting the last two; hard disk and memory. If you doubt that an NC requires a monitor (the usual argument being, use the TV) I can counter by saying that if people found that useful (in a price/functionality sense), why don't home PC's have a TV-plug option? PC buyers would rather pay $300 for the monitor than ruin their eyes watching it on a TV. This applies to the other elements as well. This argument can be applied to almost anything.
Thus, the much vaunted cost savings of NC hardware (<$500) are not derived from anything but, conceivably, the hard disk and memory. PC's tend to have hard disks, but the NC proponants claim that it would be unnecessary in an NC (perhaps because terminals for mainframes don't). However, my old 486 uses its disk all the time to cache data from the web. Without the hard disk it'd be slower (because returning to a page would need to be totally downloaded again) or would need more memory (caching in memory rather than the absent disk). Note that low-graphic mainframe terminals don't cache because each page is less than 1k.
So in fact you have to trade off-- more memory for less hard disk or vice versa. Given that hard disks are very cheap and memory is relatively expensive, I can't see that the cost equation would be in favour of all-memory. A 1 GB disk is only $500 anyway (15MB of memory equivalent?), so getting a 'slim disk' of 20MB wouldn't be significantly cheaper. I can't see a computer running across a low-bandwidth line being at all acceptable in performance without a local hard disk.
On an intranet you may get away with it, but even a 10MBit LAN isn't that fast when you copy files across it (I was surprised how slow the intranet at work actually is). Try copying 5MB from the net to your local machine at work and see how long it takes. Suppose that your NC doesn't have a disk (but probably a bit more memory than you have in a PC). You have ... a diskless workstation that is maybe $500 cheaper than a PC.
In terms of hardware, to my way of thinking, the NC simply has to cost almost the same as a PC because it needs almost all of the same componants. And if NCs where in demand, Compaq could create them by removing harddisks and shipping diskless PCs. Compaq don't seem to be trying this approach.
Note that none of the above says that the 'PC' has to be a Wintel machine. It could be running PowerPC, Alpha or anything else and OS/2, Apple, Netscape Browser or whatever. However, given that $mmm get pumped into driving down the cost of Intel hardware, and the premier OS for Wintel hardware is Windows, the chain of thinking seems clear; the cheapest NC/PC is intel-based (costs are minimal and spread across thousands of companies), the most cost-effective OS is Windows (not because everyone else uses it, but because it the most advanced for Intel. OS/2 can be purchased today, but people tend not to.)
Result, I rush out and drop $800 -- $4000 on a Wintel box that I can do almost anything with (play doom, log into MSN, work on documents from the office). My MIS people might try furnishing me with a diskless workstation at work, but when I add up the time I'm being paid to sit around when the network goes down from the extra traffic, the CFO will make MIS spring the extra $500. Nickle-and-diming employees is what failing companies do. Succesful companies tend to spend a lot on giving employees what they need to do their job. Do NSCP develop their browsers on PCs, UNIX workstations, or diskless NCs? MSFT has an average of 2 PC pers employee.
Overall, therefore, I can't really can't see where an NC will work, except in situations where you can dispense with some of the requirements. For example, in a shop you could drop the keyboard, maybe the sound. But that's hardly big business.
Now can anyone see any flaw in the argument?
Richard |
