The NC is not the same for all applications. You concentrate on the home NC. The IBM NC is purely for business applications, e.g. the secretarial pool who all need to run MS Word, and certainly don't need the latest x86 on their desktop, wasting all of those MIPS day in day out. The business argument makes a lot of sense from many aspects, notably reduced MIS costs (the main driver), reduced software costs (Corel's move to selling suites at the server level), and reduced up front hardware costs. This will appeal to a lot of CIOs who before had to worry about employees playing Doom at their desks, downloading software, installing their own applications.
A former Digital exec. was in the news this week. His company sells PCs without the disk drives for similar reasons: restricting the undersirable things employees can do with work PCs.
In this mold, I think the business NC is trouble for Intel (and maybe good for AMD, Cyrix) because a quasi dumb terminal can use cheaper uprocessors and chip sets. The Pentium Pros are restricted to the main server where the MIPS are needed.
In short, high end users shouldn't even consider an NC. For NC's to succeed where appropriate, most of your arguments don't apply in my opinion.
I'm not an expert and I'm very interested in knowing which of my arguments are misguided. Thanks in advance. |
