"Course, even if I'm right, this doesn't mean INTC can't make a few
bucks selling NCs or CPUs for NCs, and this doesn't mean that MSFT
can't sell "Windows NC" or some such. Want a real crazy thought?
In 10 years your TV could be running some version of "Windows TV".
Maybe I didn't articulate myself clearly, but your quote is my point exactly. There may be a burgeoning market for NC type devices, but those devices will end up being scaled down PC's. The way I see it, the NC is a high speed quasi-dumb terminal (a dumb terminal with extra memory and a cpu, even if that is an oxymoron). Neither Sun nor Oracle can produce these machines more efficiently or quicker than Wintel. It will be years before Java evolves to the point of being a competant OS, MSFT is shipping Windows CE by Christmas, it exists RIGHT NOW. For the money you pay to get a RISC NC, you can get a CISC PC with the eaxct same features and more speed and memory while still incorporating the "zero admin feature" ex. no local hardrive and binaries in need of upgrade and admistration, etc. You simply exclude periphials X, Y or Z. The Simply PC intiative (or something like that) has already manifested itself by CYRIX (Intel clone) shipping these sealed boxes as of yesterday, not some time in the future. May I add that thes boxes run 16 mb at 133mhz for under $1,000, and they feature the advantages of the NC. IF the NC goes after the specialized info apliance market, the Wintel arcnitecture will do the same with a much higher price/performance advantage. I don't see how the RISC boys could pull this off. Even for simplistic devices such as Cable TV boxes, cellular phones, pagers or even smart irons. MSFT already has the OS, INTC already has the time proven chips at a fraction at what ORCL and SUNW could produce.
On top of that, the reality of the NC efficiency is still in doubt. The reason why IBM mainframes and the dumb terminal went out of fashion was that the servers were too often overloaded on choked networks. Not many companies have the networking infrastructure in place to support an entire enterprise moving multiple megabytes of data back and forth simultaneously (ex. word processing documents and the actual programs that run them from the secretarial pool, spread sheets and the binaries that run them from accoutning, and databses and the RDBMS binaries that run them from records and human resources).
Some of the big companies choke when too many employess try to access html pages on an intranet (can you believe their nerve, they can't even bring up my web page). In order to benefit from a reduction in administration costs, you have to avoid a major infrastructure overhaul, which is unlikely in many enterprises of today. Then there is the spectre of adminstering the monster network itself inlieu of the client. |
