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To: MileHigh who wrote (18685)	4/14/1999 9:03:00 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 93625

MH, I just finished a project on internet appliances, so it's been top of mind lately. First, I disagree with the idea that appliances will replace computers. They will augment them. Your mobile phone might help you do e-mail, but it's going to be slow and ugly. You'll use it only when you have to. And it won't keep your calendar, so you'll need to carry your PalmPilot as well. But wait, you can't run the latest budget spreadsheet on your PalmPilot (the screen is too small to understand it) so you'll need a little palmtop device (PC?) for looking at your spreadsheet. And on which one do you watch the latest video that your kids sent of your new grandkids? Oops, there's another device. How many of these are you going to try to carry around before you say, "forget it, I'll just take my laptop along". So, while each will add functionality, each will be limited in what it can do (or said another way, each will have certain things that it will do well, but unless you want to carry 12 devices around, you'll also want a PC-like device when you want to have flexibility to do them all). I have an acquaintance (the husband of a friend of my wife's) who's working for a company that's doing a "e-mail on your cellphone" product. Personally, I think it's a long time before I'll want to do e-mail on my cellphone. Can you imagine how much time it'll take to type in a message when you have to hit 2-3 keys for every letter you want to type? It would have to be an important message. The entire cellphone industry is going to have to change to support this capability. How many Motorola/Ericsson/Nokia cellphones have you seen lately that have keyboards? I haven't seen any. I haven't heard any announcements of any (though I'm not terribly up-to-speed in that area). The largest appliance market segments today actually replace functions performed by servers, not desktops. Network-attached-storage (NAS) devices replace the disk drives that were placed on multi-purpose network servers. Internet caching appliances replace the caching function currently performed typically on a web server or on some other firewall/proxy/caching server. Fax appliances replace the fax-receiving function of general purpose servers. But you know what? The appliances are servers themselves; they're just highly optimized servers. So you can say that they replace servers, but it's just one server replacing another. I think it would be cool if my refrigerator could access the internet and let me know when I'm low on milk (it would have to have 128-bit encryption, though, since I don't want you guys to be able to tell how much wine I drink or how old my leftovers are <g>) or tell me if I have the ingredients I need to make a certain dish. But I'm not going to throw away my computer when it does. Are you? To paraphrase William Shakespeare, "a PC is a PC is a PC" and any device that replaces some function of the PC will by definition require PC capabilities itself. So call it a highly-optimized PC, but keep in mind that it will need a processor, memory, and a way to get input and output into and out of itself. And Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Compaq, et. al. are working on developing technologies for or with these products. (Microsoft has a appliance OS effort going on, Intel has their ARM core that they can dump into specialized processor chips, Dell and Compaq are both market SAN and internet caching appliances). Last but not least, remember the Network Computer. DOA. Where's the hype now? Oracle has dumped the division working on the NC (the guy working on the "e-mail on the cellphone" product used to work for that division). I only raise this issue to point out that not every idea that gets hyped is useful or successful. I believe that some appliances will be very successful and that others will fail miserably or require so long to modify the current infrastructure that I wouldn't worry about them any time soon. JMHO, Dave