tm and others, here is an editorial on SUNWs/and others putting more data on the net and less on our hard drives.....
Posted at 9:01 p.m. PDT Monday, August 30, 1999
Network computer an idea ahead of its time
BY DAN GILLMOR
Mercury News Technology Columnist
WHEN you buy a new television, you take it home, plug it in and watch. About the only set-up chore is selecting the stations you want to skip over when you're channel-surfing with your remote control.
Imagine if personal computers worked that way. You could take a new PC home, turn it on and pick up where you left off on your old machine. You wouldn't need to worry about where your data was stored or what programs you'd installed on the old box. Everything would just work.
Ha. Needless to say, the computer industry hasn't shown much interest in how consumers would prefer to do things. Setting up your new home PC is a trip to Heartburn City if you want to use your old peripheral hardware, software and personal settings.
As I noted in Sunday's column, the pain is easing ever so slightly. Manufacturers and some software companies are beginning to find a clue -- and the clue is in networks.
You'll recall that I used the Internet to retrieve the latest software for the peripheral gear I use: printer, video camera, recordable CD-ROM drive and the like. And because I plugged the new PC into a relatively simple home network, I didn't need to transfer all of my data files, but could, rather, retrieve them as needed from an older computer.
Those tasks, however, were only a hint at what's coming. For businesses and consumers alike, networks will hold most of the complexity -- and the people using computers will benefit.
Faster than we tend to notice, the Internet is taking on the functions that we once assumed were best suited to PCs. More and more, software applications will live on the Net, not the PC. This will prove especially alluring for businesses, where the need to bring down the cost of ownership will drive the trend, but it's also a no-brainer to see home users moving this way, too.
Once, my PC software included CD-ROMs containing phone listings. I don't know if it's even available anymore, but I wouldn't dream of buying this kind of thing anymore, not when I can look up numbers on Web sites. Nor, for similar reasons, would I bother with PC software that creates road maps.
Intuit, maker of the popular Quicken products, is moving its customers the same way. Before long, if the company can pull off an enormous change in its business model, Quicken customers will do the same things online they tend to do on their PCs today -- and then some. The Web connections in the current version of Quicken make the product enormously more useful than the stand-alone version ever could be.
You can back up your important files on floppy disks or other storage at home. Or you can sign up with any number of Internet services that let you back up your vital data online.
Extend that notion to your PC desktop itself. Net-based companies are coming up with tools that let computer users re-create their PC ``desktops' online. When you log onto another PC your desktop goes with you.
I don't know when or if my current word processor will live online. I do know that I'm soon going to start writing an online-only column that I'll be able to update from any browser. The online program I'll use for the new column won't have the formatting prowess built into the word processors I use on my PCs, but it'll be just fine for its assigned task -- and I know it'll improve quickly.
Sun Microsystems Inc.'s just-announced purchase of Star Division, which makes an office suite, points to some future Net-based possibilities for today's desktop applications. Sun aims to make Star Office a Web-based product over time.
The best Internet applications are the ones designed to be on the Net to begin with: search engines, directories, commerce sites and the like. Yahoo's directory and affiliated applications are software, after all. They are big and powerful applications, but the only thing you or I need to run them is a browser.
All of this fits, by the way, into a once-derided category called the ``network computer.' No, it didn't come along as quickly as predicted by its early promoters, including Oracle's Larry Ellison and Sun's Scott McNealy, and the disk-less terminal didn't swamp the PC, which continues to be the best way to get onto networks for many people. So lots of people wrongly pronounced the network computer dead on arrival.
The promoters were right all along, at least about the fundamental idea. The network is the best place to keep a system's complexity. When users are running network-based software via their browsers, systems administrators only have to fix the software at the center. Everyone gets the upgrade immediately, just as every subscriber to a cable-TV system gets the new channel at the same time.
New kinds of Net-connected devices -- easy-to-use appliances that do one or two things simply and reliably -- will tap all that power, in ways we've barely begun to contemplate. The PC isn't going away, but it's going to become much easier to use and configure.
Large enterprises will change first, because the financial advantages will be so obvious -- and because high-speed network connections, essential to this trend, are already common in companies.
Caveat: The networked future will depend on improvements in an area where we've been seeing a torrent of bad news lately: security. The horrendous breach in Microsoft's Hotmail service, made public Monday, is just one example. A combination of better security practices and wider use of encryption, scrambling data to keep it from prying eyes, isn't just a good idea. It's crucial.
LAUGHING OUT LOUD: That was one reader's response to Sunday's column. I described how I got a new PC -- telling a local clone maker to assemble it from specified parts -- and then set it up at home.
``You guys in Silicon Valley certainly live in a self-contained little world!!' wrote the reader in an e-mail that arrived from Australia on Monday morning. ``I find it almost impossible for someone with your array of skills to have ever found computer purchase `difficult.'
``You described an activity little changed from the days when I bought my first computer -- a Tandy Model 1 -- **with disk drives** no less, and the stunning ability to let me key in games from a book that was bundled with it -- oh yes, and the one package I wanted -- word processing. All for the price of a four-door family car.'
For the record: As I said, I don't recommend that novices order the way I did. I also said that setting it up and getting it running at home was slightly less anguishing than in the past.
But I may have left the impression that things are improving more quickly on the ease-of-use front than reality would indicate. They aren't.
That's why I can scarcely wait for more appliance-like, network-based computing. We need the help, all of us.
Seems that well managed storaged on the net will be getting boosts from all over!! Any thoughts out there on FC SANs role here? Thanks in advance.
SUNW and MTI are well positioned.... |
