The query struck a nerve. For the last year Ellison and Sun Microsystems honcho Scott McNealy have been predicting that NCs would eventually replace PCs. Computers, they argue, should be just an appendange to the Net. Not only should you be able to get your news, sports and cheesecake pictures from cyberspace, but your applications and information should be out there, too (properly protected, of course). That way, wherever you are, you can simply go to any one of these generic boxes and have everything at your fingertips. While both Oracle and Sun will soon sell NCs, it’s still an open question whether thescheme actually helps plain old users. Ellison certainly didn’t provide an answer; after Winer kept pressing him, the Zen-loving billionaire finally instructed Winer to shut up. By the end of the conference, chipheads were joking that NC really stood for “No Credibility.”
That’s too harsh a judgment. There are good uses for the NC, particularly in businesses where everyone is connected to a high-speed network. In such operations, the hidden cost of owning PCs is high: over its lifetime, a typical desktop computer can cost a company more than $40,000 in maintenance. Proponents of network computers claimthat machines hooked to a centralized server cost a fraction of that to maintain. FTD, for instance, the flower-deliv-ery service, plans to replace all its 17,000 PCs and terminals with Sun NCs.
But some analysts believe the machines are too limited for consumers, who would prefer a full-fledged PC, even ffit’s secondhand. And then there’s cost. Industry experts doubt that that NCs will sell for much less than $700, while PCs continue to drop in price.
Perhaps the strongest argument against the NC is psychological. A network computer stores data and software remotely. But people want things on their cornput-ers, tucked sately away on their hard disks (or backed up on floppies). “I just can’t imagine people at home dialing up-to a network and having an their data be stored on a network and not their home hard drive,” says Duncan Davidson, managing parmer with
The McKenna Group, a consulting firm in Palo Alto. “It goes counter to the complete trend of consumer behavior in the last 15 or 20 years, which is to gain more control, not less.”
So why are Ellison and MeNealy so gung-ho on the idea.* Because NCs require a new kind of operating system–one that isn’t necessarily designed by Microsoft, their blood enemy. But did they really think that the Lords of Software in Redmond, Wash.,
were snoozing? Last week Microsoft announced a design for a less radical version of an NC and claimed support from industry giants Intel, Compaq, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. This machine will supposedly keep support costs down but still hold on to the hard disk, the better to run the Microsoft software that you already know and love so much. Microsoft cans its brainchild the Net Computer, but really it’s the Nyet Computer –a big No to its competitors who had hoped that the NC would upset the balance of power in the software world.
