After two years, the outcome of the most nakedly ferocious power struggle
in the industry - between traditional Windows PCs and a new breed of
so-called network computers (NC) - still is very much in doubt.
NCs are an elegantly simple idea - in effect a desktop computer whose hard disk resides on one or more networked servers. But there are few large-scale deployments yet and almost none of these are using NCs as they were originally envisioned - as client systems that do away with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows to run a new breed of Java applets.
Instead, most NCs today are accessing applications on Unix servers and mainframes or, ironically, on multiuser Windows NT servers. The reason is there have been few Java applets available for NCs. Only now are users seeing more products for sale, such as the eSuite Java business applets, formerly called Kona, from Lotus Development Corp., and the StarOffice 4.0 office suite from Star Division GmbH.
Still unproven is how well NCs will run Java applets. Make applets too large and they take forever to download and may run slowly. Make them too small and they lack the features end users need.
One solution is to improve raw performance, which Sun Microsystems, Inc. is doing by tuning Java and by creating faster compilers.
Another solution is to create distributed or client/server Java applications - a display applet on the NC renders the results of a processing "servlet" running on an application server. But building these applications is far more complex than creating small, stand-alone applets.
Despite this unrealized potential, the NC idea, aggressively popularized by Oracle Corp. Chairman Larry Ellison, has forced Microsoft to respond. Ellison argues that in the age of the World Wide Web, Windows PCs are costly, cumbersome, inefficient and unmanageable.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has conceded that PCs are, indeed, complex and difficult to manage. As a result, Microsoft and Intel Corp. accelerated their work on simplifying PC management. They even created a "NetPC" specification, a set of software and APIs that will let network managers remotely monitor PCs and change or replace their software. Most PC vendors have not aggressively marketed the NetPCs, believing them to be a niche product, but they busily are incorporating many NetPC features into their existing product lines.
Microsoft also created its own thin-client alternative to NCs - the Windows-based terminal (WBT). WBTs will run the Windows CE operating system and access applications on a multiuser NT server, called Hydra. WBT hardware and software are scheduled to begin shipping by April.
Whoever wins, it is clear that the future desktop will be integrated much more closely with the network and will be thinner than today's stand-alone Windows PC. But whether the PC itself has been eclipsed remains to be seen.
