It’s taken a while but the mainstream media has finally got around to blowing the lid off the NC Network Computer hype. Market research reports published last week that suggested that NC shipments are lower than had been expected, combined with the fact that Dataquest doesn’t expect the market to be significant this decade or anytime soon, got the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek fired up enough to ask Sun Microsystems Inc, IBM Corp, Oracle Corp and other NC proponents what had happened to their dream of clearing green screens and hairball PCs off corporate desktops. To cut a long story short, the PC industry is beating the NC at its own game; partly by design and partly by default. TCO studies showing the spiraling cost of owning, upgrading and managing PCs were meant to drive users into the arms of the NC vendors and their cheap, diskless devices. Instead PC vendors learned from the studies and were able, together with cheap memory, commodity parts and build-to-order strategies, to slash prices and build NC alternatives such as Windows terminals and cut down PCs running software from the likes of Citrix Systems Inc. Dataquest expects 482,000 NCs to be delivered this year, up from just 144,000 in 1997. Compare that with the 90 million PCs which shipped last year. PC vendors’ other advantage was that much-hyped NCs simply never materialized, at least not in the way they’d been aggressively hyped by Sun, Oracle et al since late 1995. Java, it is clear, simply wasn’t up to the job at that time. Companies that actually produced Java NCs such as Boundless Technologies Inc simply couldn’t sell any. The Java NC initiative morphed into a bunch of kludged solutions running cut- down forms of client software including Windows. Even now after 1,000-odd days of the Java programming language, we can’t point to an end-to-end Java infrastructure supporting the use of distributed Java applications on Java servers and Java NCs. Sun’s vaunted JavaStation, the full-function microSparc IIep-based device, won’t ship in any quantity until the second half of this year. No wonder NC ‘poster boys’ such as FedEx, Saab, First Union and CSX are abandoning NCs for the new breed of cheap PCs. IBM has had most success selling NCs as replacements for green screens at its mainframe customer sites, and also by running Windows applications on the devices. There’s nothing wrong with the NC concept but its proponents got way ahead of themselves. They promised an eager audience products and solutions, but moreover a vision that they were, and still are, unable to deliver. As Sun COO Ed Zander reflects life’s about execution as well as a great strategy.
