If you are wondering "if Windows is most vulnerable in narrow-bandwidth environments, why are IBM, Sun and Oracle focusing the NC battle on the corporate LAN (broadband) battleground with the NC?"
I believe the answer is that all three of these companies cannot resist trying to capitalize on corporate complaints about the costly problem of managing much-maligned networked PCs. After all, large corporations are the bread and butter customers of each of these technology giants.
Of course this strategy plays right into Microsoft's hand. The technical difficulties of making the NC adequate for corporate use are large and numerous, and they will take years to resolve completely. The reason is NCs must be capable of executing (on the server or locally) legacy programs to replace broadly-used PCs on corporate LANs. Getting this right for a JVM equipped with few local applications is challenging. Only pure Java applications will operate the way the NC is intended to function; all others probably will have to execute on the server and treat the NC as a dumb terminal, a la XWindows or Winterms.
Suffice it to say that it will take years before any corporate decision-maker confidently can replace generic PCs with NCs. (Mainframe-type, inflexible application environments using dumb terminals or PCs can be replaced today with confidence, but who cares?) In the meantime, corporate decision-makers will simply leverage the threat of a switch to the NC to get what Microsoft and Intel want desperately to accomplish anyway: simplified PC management. They will never decide to replace PCs when faced with the slightest risk of failure.
IBM, Sun and Oracle should jump with all six feet through the window of opportunity which exists now in the consumer space characterized today by limited bandwidth communications. Everything is going for them in this space. First, Microsoft management solutions being devised will not work without broadband communications (it is impractical to store and access PC applications dynamically over low-speed modems). Second, there is no legacy consumer code that needs to be accommodated dynamically. (There may be any number of needed capabilities outside the JVM, like handling real-time video, but these would be fixed, local components of the NC/OS, not applications downloaded on the fly.) All this means that the consumer NC can be a pure JVM with networking and a relatively simple client/server coordination protocol-well within the means of the three technology giants to solve quickly. Third, at consumer quantities, the NC would be priced well below PCs, at prices consumers would find attractive. If done fast enough, they could dominate the consumer desktop space, from which they could launch an all out attack on Microsoft's PC monopoly.
Allen |
