>>You can get a high end, competantly equipped 486 or a low end Pentium for between $399 and $700 (these prices drop even further everytime INTC cuts chip prices). These machines will enalbe you to do more thatn just surf the web. the present regime will not voluntarily allow the commodity products such as the webtv to encroach upon thier turf.
I don't doubt that the price points of one- or two-generation-behind PC's will continue to come down, but the consumer appliance makers will not be standing still either. If the 486 comes down to $400, I believe the Web appliance will come down to $100 (or be greatly subsidized and possibly given away by telcos and cable companies selling access services) - it is really a very simple device.
Moreover, it is the very richness and flexibility of the computer that puts it at odds with the consumer, IMHO. "The ability to do more than just surf the web" comes at a price (both in $ and Time) that I don't think the "blinking 12:00 AM" crowd will be willing to pay. Plus fundamental applications (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, banking, portfolio management, games/entertainment, etc.) will be readily available in the WWW and delivered through browsers in the notsodistant future.
People will have different information needs, and the PC is no longer the only game in town. If Msft really wants to dominate the consumer market, they'll need to port IE to the same devices that Netscape is porting Navigator. ActiveX may be technologically awesome, but it only runs on IE, whereas Java runs everywhere. If I'm a forward thinking developer, I'll err on the side of universal availability, meaning I'll sacrifice the bells and whistles I may get with ActiveX (which I probably will get with Java anyway, if I spend a little more time programming - and even here, plenty of efforts are currently geared toward creating CASE/code generation tools and repositories that will make Java programming much more straightforward than it is now)
Even if Microsoft ports IE, it is not a revenue generator for them, so they're sinking $$$. Windows CE is compelling, but it too would need to be ported. What I believe to be Msft's greatest asset, its loyal, powerful, cohesive Developer Network, may be at risk of dissipating in the face of the closed and proprietary nature of Microsoft's operating systems vs. the open nature of Java/IIOP/IDL and the portability of Netscape. |
