Why are people still harping about the NC (whether Corel's, SUN's or IBM's). The NC has lost its window of opportunity, read Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy dropped the ball on this one. The machine at an initial sub-$500 value could have been lucrative, at least in replacing those outdated ASCII terminals (they really aren't dumb terminals, just a moniker that they picked-up in the 70s, sort of like the TRASH 80's) and most likely the X-terminals, as well.
We'll probably see Java, as intended by its creators, survive in the smart robot technologies (i.e. a toaster that can read your e-mail, har! har!) and smart cards, etc... Whether it survives as an OS remains to be seen (you can't count out IBM and SUN in this avenue). However,as with the UNIX, the biggest detractor's of Java OS, are the Java OS consotium partners. It will most likely crack as each vendor tries to differentiate "their" technology from their consortium partners' technology.
Remember, that PCs, NCs and all such hardware platforms are commodity based products. If they all run exactly the same OS (the true goal of UNIX, or whether they all run Windows NT/95/...), what differentiates
their products from their competitor? One would say, price, speed, reliability, performance; but, its not always "cut and dry". Just ask anyone to rate the best PC on the market, not as easy as one would think. The hardware vendors such as: IBM, SUN, HP, CompaQ, Dell, etc..., do not want to have to compete on such a level field (just look at the car market, similar brake technology, but no two cars are ever really comparable). Their tactic will be to agree to the base standards just enough to comply, and try to differentiate themselves as inobtrusively as possible. Ask any Java developer to detail the "true portability" of the JAVA byte code across different JVMs.
It comes down to who you want to suppport, SUN's Scott McNealy or Microsoft's Bill Gates, I would pick Bill Gates. They both want to be the most powerfull (what CEO doesn't), but Bill Gates is a better business man then Scotrt McNealy.
Ciao!
Jim Shaw |
