Whatever happened to the NC?The PC is the NC,did you know???
Tango:
Did read The Economist article "After the PC",interesting article but here is a counter argument for the Economist titled "The Un-PC"
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Source:Forbes
The Network Computer was supposed to break Microsoft's hammerlock on the consumer market. It scared Gates a bit-but did him no damage.
The un-PC
By Julie Pitta
REMEMBER the Network Computer, that $500 Web surfer that was going to grab the mass market away from the PC? Only a few people would need personal computers. The masses would buy a simple gadget and use it to bring the Internet to the family TV set.
Three years after Oracle chief Larry Ellison introduced the concept amid much fanfare at a computer industry powwow, the NC looks ready for a Smithsonian exhibition on promising technologies that went nowhere. Oracle and a half-dozen other outfits spent roughly $1 billion on NCs, including R&D and acquisitions, and have little to show for it: Fewer than 1 million were sold in 1997, as against some 80 million PCs.
What happened? For one thing, PCs got cheaper. Today's PCs sell for as little as $900. "The PC became the NC," Ellison admits. "I'll be remembered for bringing down the price of a PC," he adds ruefully.
That's only part of it. The NC was as complex as the PC but couldn't do a fraction of the things a PC could do. Ellison's and Sun Chairman McNealy's NCs were little more than stripped-down PCs using Sun's Java instead of Microsoft's Windows.
Why were smart guys like Ellison and McNealy so wrong about the NC? We suspect a bit of wishful thinking. In their passion to one-up Bill Gates, they allowed the wish to become father to the conviction.
Even so, Ellison and McNealy had Gates worried. In response, last April Gates bought WebTV, a Silicon Valley startup that invented a computer allowing Web surfing on a TV. At the same time Microsoft developed a streamlined version of Windows for so-called dumb terminals.
Gates, too, has gotten slight return for his investment in NCs. WebTV has sold a modest 400,000 units, Oracle and Sun even fewer. Microsoft still rules. |
