Right on Fred!
By Tony Perkins
Red Herring Online
November 19, 1998
Today the Red Eye is leaving for Las Vegas to jump
into the Comdex mosh pit. The one rule I have is to
never spend the night in that strange, weird town where
middle-American gamblers and high-heeled prostitutes
run wild through the night. My plan is to catch up with
Ziff-Davis CEO Eric Hippeau and have a board
meeting, then catch the next flight home.
A topic of more interest than board meetings was the
arm-wrestling of ideas that went on between Dan Rosen
of Microsoft and Sun's Bill Joy at the Herring's CEO
summit on the future of technology, called NDA '98,
held in La Jolla earlier this month. Read on and learn
what two leading geeks see in the future.
Sun and Microsoft face off -- sort of -- at NDA '98
LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA -- The mission of our
NDA '98 conference was to assemble technology
CEOs and give them an advance look at what our
editors see as the top ten trends in technology for 1999.
The printed version of these trends appeared in our
December issue of the Red Herring.
Ten trends for the post-PC world
Dan Rosen, Microsoft's general manager of new
technology, presented his own top trends at NDA in
response to ours, and they are worth pondering.
1.Computers will listen, speak, see, and learn.
2.The PC will remain your "secure home place." On
it you will store your personal information,
analyze data, and so on. It will be the centerpiece
of your "Web lifestyle."
3.Networked applications will evolve from today's
applications and drive the customer-value
proposition for use of the Net. Over time, new
network applications will emerge to make the
Web lifestyle ever more integral to people's lives.
4.Bandwidth will still be limited for consumers, who
will still spend, on average, less than $30 per
month for access. This access will be provided to
most consumers by at most two competitors. (Of
course, then, as now, large businesses will have
all the bandwidth they need at reasonable prices
from a wide choice of suppliers.)
5.98 percent of all U.S. telecoms' traffic will be
data.
6.Most of this traffic will be from networked
applications, not interpersonal communications.
7.Almost all consumer goods over $25 will include
a computer that will communicate.
8.The bulk of commerce will continue to be local
and face-to-face, but consumers will use the Net
to help them find what they want. Most
e-commerce will be global, with merchants selling
all over the world.
9.Our industry will still be hyper-competitive. We
will still be having debates about the merits of
quick-prototype languages vs. more efficient and
scalable languages.
10.People will still embrace evolutionary technology
changes and resist revolutionary ones.
Mr. Rosen's presentation came after Sun founder and
VP of Technology Bill Joy presented Sun's new Jini
technology, and dogged Windows and Windows NT as
overbloated operating systems of a past era.
Bottling Jini
"Our answer is to put Java everywhere, because it is
modern, object-oriented, and compatible to larger
systems, and their ansewer is to put C code
everywhere, which is a much more complex language
that is hard to maintain and debug," Mr. Joy explained.
We were curious enough about Mr. Joy's comments to
chase him down in the lobby after his presentation and
ask the obvious question. Bill Gates is certainly not a
stupid man, we contended; what did he think Microsoft
was up to?
"Well, according to the email [released during the DOJ
trial against Microsoft] I read, they are trying to 'corrupt,
pollute, and destroy' Java, and they are still trying to put
Windows everywhere," said Mr. Joy.
But why hadn't Java been widely deployed on the
client-side as he had promised us it would be? "Well,
there have been some strong forces trying to prevent it,"
he claimed. His real answer came next: "Once the tools
and next generation of virtual machines come out, which
will improve performance and compatibility -- combined
with the fact that you can program Java applications four
times as fast as you can in C -- [it] will force even the
big guys to convert," he forecasted.
Other than the Java/Windows debate, Mssrs. Joy and
Rosen's other bone of contention was over the evolution
of the personal computer. As Mr. Rosen pointed out in
his trend #2 above, Microsoft still believes that the PC
will remain your "secure home place," where you will do
most of your work.
On the contrary, Mr. Joy said. "The PC of the next
wave will be the combination of an organizer, pager, and
cellular phone -- a pocket-sized personal communicator
that you take everywhere you go and is always on and
always hooked to the Net." Mr. Joy's overarching
theme for the future of the PC is simplicity for the
consumer. "Like Steve Jobs likes to say, 'When you are
at simplicity, there ain't no complexity.' Microsoft will
not be able to make something simple out of something
complex."
Most certainly, we will all eventually see who's right. In
the meantime, The Red Eye would love to hear what our
viewers think.
|
