NC sales not so hot, Dataquest says

Worldwide shipments of network computers (NCs) were below expectations last year and will likely be sluggish until 2001, Dataquest Inc. said yesterday.

In 1997, 144,040 NCs were shipped, and 482,196 are expected to ship this year worldwide, according to Dataquest, a unit of market researcher GartnerGroup Inc.

The NC market has not lived up to its hype as a result of "lateness to market, fading interest from key parties, plummeting PC prices and the expected emergence of Windows terminals," a Dataquest statement said.

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows terminal and NetPC strategies offer cost-effective alternatives through the use of existing PC hardware and the ability to run Windows applications -- "now as a de facto standard," said Kimball Brown, vice president and chief analyst of Dataquest's Intranet and Web Servers Worldwide program in the same statement.

Although the thin client hardware market hasn't reached projections for growth, network computing as a software architecture is emerging well as corporations see the benefit of a centrally controlled computing environment and move their applications development focus in that direction, Brown said.

The thin client market will struggle until the software for it is developed, according to Dataquest. Network computing software will become the dominant model for new business applications in 2001, and new hardware architectures, such as the Java computer, will lag new software by three to five years, Dataquest projected.

"Through at least 2001, NC hardware products will exist purely because of the force of will of IBM (Corp.) and Sun (Microsystems Inc.)," Dataquest said. "These products will succeed, or force the PC to take their space: for IBM and Sun, either outcome is a victory, because the prize is the server and not the desktop."

NCs for naught?
A survey by Network World and Deloitte and Touche Consulting Group finds most shops have few NC plans. Network World, 12/15/97.