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| Talk,
Graham Bower,
07 January 1999 | |
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"The PC is dead."
That's what they told us. Or, that's what Larry Ellison, charismatic CEO of Oracle told us, to be more exact. And he wasn't alone. But the PC seems healthier than ever, and with Apple's launch of the new G4, we now have a PC that's classified as a weapon by the US government.
It's funny to think that it was only a year or so ago that so many industry analysts were hailing the death of the PC and proclaiming "long live the NC". You can be forgiven if you're unfamiliar with that acronym, since it never amounted to much, but for the record, it stood for "Network Computer".
Of course the NC fans were correct to the extent that these days it is unusual indeed to find a computer that is not networked. But the NC movement was about more than hooking PCs up to modems and ethernet connections. They had a vision that computers would would be thinned down from the hulking desktop beasts of today to become "thin clients."
A thin client is a stripped down PC, optimised to run software similar to a web browser that accesses applications remotely from a more powerful server - rather like the way Microsoft's Hotmail gives users access to an email client via a web browser. Ellison's vision was that NC's would be able to access any number of powerful applications with nothing more than a low spec computer. The rational presumably went that as long as your internet connection was fast enough, you could render all the optical effects for the next Star Wars movie with little more than a pocket calculator. In fact, anyone who has struggled to view movie files on an old 486 can tell you that thin is not always beautiful when you're trying to access streaming media over the internet.
Microsoft has always had it's doubts about Network Computers. Bill Gates himself has been openly critical about the concept - as the provider of the fattest client of them all, Windows 98, he would say that wouldn't he. But with typical pragmatism, Microsoft's vested interest in the PC market did not stop them from developing an NC operating system, and with the help of Sega, arguably developing the world's first actual NC - the Sega Dreamcast. Running the Windows CE operating system, with a built-in modem and costing under £200, it seems to conform to almost all of Ellison's criteria of an NC.
The other glimmer of hope for the NC is Sun Microsystem's announcement that they're launching an office suite "Star Office" to rival market leader Microsoft Office - but the twist is, they will be providing an online version of Star Office. You will be able to use Star Office's spread sheet and word processor with nothing more than a web browser.
So, maybe the future for the Network Computer is not so bleek after all. No-one can argue with the success of network applications like Hotmail, and Microsoft themselves seem to be warming to the idea of the NC - perhaps because as consumers expectations from their computer increase, NCs cease to look so thin. In fact, with consumers demanding streaming multimedia and voice integration, thin clients are looking fatter all the time. Anyone for a PC?
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