You seem to be up to date on the NC. Could you elaborate on your sources of information and/or experience?
This is my sense of what is happening in the NC arena, not to include generic internet appliances. I wonder if you agree.
Oracle now plainly sees that there are two primary versions of the NC: consumer and corporate.
The consumer NC consists of: (1) system routines necessary to maintain the client/server relationship, including a smart card signon (2) internet browser and Java and ActiveX Virtual Machine, and (3) vaguely defined multimedia capability for games and TV (I think this should be the equivalent of a remote DVD player). The infrastructure for the consumer NC is fairly simple except for the VOD part, which could hold back deployment for years if it is taken too seriously. If that part of the capability is postponed, then deployment could begin in earnest in late 1997.
The corporate NC duplicates all the capability of the consumer NC and adds the ability to integrate legacy applications including: SQL connection to database, COBOL, Fortran, Visual Basic, C, C++ all magically object wrapped and handled by CORBA-compliant Object Request Brokers. I would guess that most of the legacy code, unlike Java Applets, would have to execute on the server communicating through Java wrappings to the client.
Two years is the reported timeframe for NCI to get the corporate NC all in place. (Recall our previous exchange when I indicated that I thought WIND had lots of time to "get it right".) IBM is pursuing a similar objective called the San Francisco project which is not concretely specified at the moment. In the meantime, corporate customers are willing to experiment with a Java NC which could be useful for new or reprogrammed applications. Corporate utilization of the NC will remain small, almost in the sampling range, until full-scale corporate deployment is possible (as limited by the server) toward the end of the century.
Oracle's NCI has enticed six to eight manufactures to begin making NC's by mid-year. The questions are:
(1) Will these manufacturers be using the newest reference NC/OS? That is, will they be using the VxWorks version?
(2) Who are the NC's targeted for: consumers or corporations?
(3) What kinds of production quantities are expected in 1997 and 1998?
I am interested in your take on these observations.
Allen |
