Forget the whole NC discussion because it is irrelevant. The NC is nothing but reconfigured PC designed for optimal cost-performance in a totally networked environment. The same issues being raised here about PCs were the same one's being used a year ago on this thread to explain why Java wasn't going anywhere. The NC is going to be massive, period end of discussion.
Continuing... the PC makes a perfectly good NC as does a laptop, notebook or whatever. The reason large retailers and banks will be moving into the more terminal-like or portable-like NCs will be software. Good software takes a couple of years and IBM has some very good Java-based software due out in January. Java will replace the Windows API and corporate customers will demand open APIs, open file formats (new versions of HTML for example) and so on. The fact is, they have tons of Sun, Novel, IBM and other equipment that they don't need to replace with the next Sun, IBM or Novel proprietary nightmare. The greedy people at Sun, IBM and Novell realize (as they always have) that they can only take out Microsoft by delivering the solution customers have always known they wanted anyway: an open architecture.
Look, Visual Basic with COM and DCOM are vastly inferior to Java with Beans and CORBA and you are going to see Microsoft lose and lose big in banking, broadcasting, communications services and other serious business ventures. |
