Jim,
This is not a court of law & I'm not interested in a formal debate
where "facts" are separated from "opinions". You can believe what
you want. The NC has a place in corporate computing and 1997 will
be the first year it is to be tested.
Your analysis of how the NC is designed to work is essentially
correct. You are also correct that Java does not have to run
on an NC. The NC has some important advantages over PC's that
begin with price. The "niche" you're talking about can be expanded
to include just about any office in any company, large & small
in the world. Don't forget, the main reason that PC's have
succeeded is because of price, NOT performance. Bill Gates has
chanted his mantra "it's cheaper, it's cheaper, it's cheaper" over
and over again for years. The makers of the NC revisited an old
idea, the X-terminal, and gave it a new face. There is no reason
why you can't put high speed processors & lots of memory with a
high-quality graphics interface on everyone's desk & get performance
that is equal to a PC at a lower cost.
The bulk of desktop applications the PC has been known for are
interactive & do not require the throughput of a server or even a
high-end workstation. Sun's NC comes equipped with 100mb ethernet
& a high-speed graphics instruction set (in hardware) for multi-media applications. The addition of Java to the NC enhances its appeal
as an end-user computer. Corel (Sp?) of Canada has purchased the
popular word processor Word Perfect & is re-writing it as a Java
application.
Using smart terminals in place of PC's makes good sense from the
standpoint of security and administration. One reason large
corporations trust using computers is because they are at least as
secure as manual systems. One reason IBM made its mark in corporate
computing was because the 3270 terminal was safely placed outside
the data center. IBM protocols restricted access to the data making
a hacker's life difficult. Most large companies that have critical
applications supporting their business operations won't let PC's
anywhere near them. One example I'm familiar with is Charles Schwab
Inc., the discount stock broker in SF. They announced that they
were going to replace their "Windows" PC's with "NT". Sounds
impressive, doesn't it? Schwab has quite a few employees, many of
whom use PC's. Well does this mean that Schwab is looking to put
its on-line trading system on PC's running NT? Not in your life.
Schwab does ALL account transactions on IBM 3090's, none of which
are in SF. The PC's running NT are all customer service terminals
which can easily be replaced, at lower cost, by NC's.
Java will work well on the NC because it restricts access to the filesystem & doesn't allow for process forking. In fact, Sun is working on putting Java into hardware, a smart move for an
interpreted language. They also have released api's for bsd-socket implementations & nfs support, improving upon the use of html as an application & presentation layer.
Administration will be simple. Hardware-wise, there are fewer things
to go wrong & software is loaded from a central server, thus solving
problems with version control & software incompatibility & distribution costs.
NC's will be able to deliver the computing resources most people now
get from PC's at a reduced cost. That's why it's a popular idea
whose time has come.
Even Bill Gates, with his limited imagination, now recognizes the
value of NC's. He just signed a deal with Hewlett-Packard to make
one featuring Microsoft software. |
