Slashdot Mirror
Sun President Says PCs Are Relics
christchurch map writes "Jonathan Schwartz, president of server and software maker Sun Microsystems, said that the personal computer is increasingly becoming a relic. Instead, what has become important are Web services on the Internet and the majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their mobile phones." From the article: "Schwartz points to the increasing wealth and power of companies, like eBay, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.com, that profit from free services available over the network. Among his audience, many more people said they'd rather have access to Internet services than their desktop computing applications. And Microsoft--the company with the biggest financial stake in the PC software business--has struggled to cope with the arrival of Web services."
The issue is always one of compute versus bandwidth.
The advantages of centralising compute is obvious - most PC's are idle for 99% of the time - so if we put the compute resources somewhere we can all share them then we can have 100x performance when we need it.
However, the PC can only be replaced with some kind of Web appliance and a honking great central server is only possible when there is sufficient bandwidth and low enough latency for ALL applications. If there is even one necessary application which needs more bandwidth than a typical network connection can provide - then you're screwed and you need a full blown computer at every location.
If you are talking about an office setup where people are doing word processing, spreadsheets and other predominantly text-based work - then maybe Mr Schwartz is right - but think about this - a Web-appliance capable of rendering nice interfaces isn't going to be a whole lot cheaper than a regular PC.
For a home setup, things are even worse.
When we play games - we need (at a minimum) 76Hz video at 1600x1200 full colour resolution...plus a couple of 44kHz audio channels...sustained - no dropouts and minimal latency.
That's 76 x 1600x1200 x 24 bits/second of graphics...3.5Gbits/sec. Realtime compression tricks might cut that in half - but even a dedicated 1GHz link to eachuser is insufficient.
A T1 line to every user (1.544Mbits/sec) wouldn't come close. Right now, you'd need a high quality synchronous optical network into every home.
It's possible - but compared to the cost of buying a $200 PC with a $100 graphics card, it's a non-starter.
www.sjbaker.org
Is this some news from the future?
I guess I grossly overpaid on my dual core AMD64 3800+ relic which I built just today.
Trolling is a art,
One could also say centralized servers are relics also, with the advent of peer to peer networking (Bittorrent, etc).
AC comments get piped to
Funny to think that Hotmail is cutting into MS Word this way...
I suggest you read Slashdot
Of course he is going to say that. Nobody is buying Sun hardware anymore. He wants us to consider
PCs as relics and buy the next BIG thing coming from SUN (whatever that is).
About 10 years ago. And they weren't right then...has anything actually changed? Well, there are more vendors of services, but honestly, is it enough?
I'm not so sure yet.
what is he selling now: consider the source.
Yeah, right. Like a 128x92 screen is as useable as a 1600x1200 one.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
And its still not true.
is why Sun is such a very successful company.
That's why thin clients are so popular these days. The Internet isn't the end-all, be-all that this fucking idiot thinks it is. He's clearly out of touch with reality. Oh well.
You can have my pc when you pry it from my cold dead hands. My phone supports the web and I've used it exactly twice for this feature (mapquest for directions). Using a 3 inch screen is a drastically different situation than using a 21 inch. If I am going to leisurly browse the web, do shopping or anything that takes longer than 3 minutes its going to be on a real computer. I find looking at the phone screen for too long causes headaches.
Not to mention...
If the PC is a relic, where are documents going to be created? Not on a pda or cell phone.
If the PC is a relic, where are games going to be played? Sure you've got the xbox #, ps#, nintendo systems but certain games lend themselves better to pcs.
General computers, i.e. systems that can do everything, are not going anywhere for a long time.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Has this man ever heard of a concept known as "PC gaming"? The PC is more than just a service utility these days. It's a total entertainment device. Unless there are some leaps and bounds in the broadband technology employed across the US, there is simply no way anyone would want to play games like Half-Life or Doom 3 as "internet services".
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Sun are still hoping that the network computer becomes popular before they have to file for bankruptcy.
To tell the truth, the day of the network computer may finally be near. Now at last we have net based email applications which are more or less as good as the PC based ones. And some net based games are decent as well although they are not even close in presentation to PC based games. But for games cleverness and network features may compensate for bad presentation.
But we still need a net based text editor (aka Word) in order to make any network computer feasable.
Then again, even if the network computer becomes popular, will Sun be able to reap the benefits? In order for the concept to work it has to be cheap and sun is not good at building anything cheap. And anything Sun can do, Linux and BSD can do for cheaper.
Come on. If you are raising kids nowadays and do not have a computer for them to do homework on, you are messing up. Yea a lot of people do just use their computers as a glorified web browsing machine, but to say the PC is a relic, that is just ridiculous. I know a lot of people (outside of the /. Type crowd) who use their computers many other things. Especially with the new decreased costs, if anything PC's will get to the point where not just every house has one, but every person. Two PC households are very common.
PCs aren't the only relics. It's too bad for Sun that expensive servers running proprietary Operating Systems on proprietary hardware are relics too.
Can a mobile phone do flash games,show big pages like /. without a special phone mark up language, or anything else a PC can do?
Fallout 3 will suck.
The same technology that goes into the powerful centralized server can always be mass produced cheaply and sold in much greater volume to public at large. As long as that compute power and storage is available at a cheap price, software products will be created to exploit it.
Unless of course, the cost of producing a CPU attains the level of a mortgage, which it might someday.
that'll never happens /HighSpeedInternetForHome.asp
http://www22.verizon.com/FiosForHome/channels/Fio
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
That's a whole lot of relics being manufactured and sold!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Sun is so out of touch. If I was going to do what they advocate I sure as hell wouldn't use UNIX or Windows. I'd use an iSeries. At least decent business apps are available and you don't have to try to figure out the vendors nameing strategy. What's iPlanet called now? It's no wonder Microsoft kicked their ass in SMB and Linux is stealing a lot of their existing business.
"never met a Microsoft zealot"
I like to keyboard over ham radio (PSK31). If the audio signal had to go to some server and decode into readable text back to my screen, by that time the band conditions would be different and to answer back text to audio using software on a server would delay the answer even more.
Its not exactly surprising that these words are coming from Sun, seeing as their motto has been "The network is the computer" for at least the last 10 years now. The web as an application platform has been making notable steps forward, but there are always going to be large enough differences in browser platforms so as to cause problems in non-homogenous environments. The web browser is increasingly becoming a new 'operating system', and as with our existing operating systems, it has all the differing configurations and incompatibilities between versions that we've come to expect from any such platform. Moving from one of these environments to the other has made sense for simple data-based applications for a long time now and we're increasingly seeing interactive applications move forward with AJAX/Flash based approaches, but its not a total replacement for the native desktop applications at the moment. Thats not even to mention the vast variations in bandwidth availability across the world, and the limitations that can place on development.
Business Voyeur
Honestly, this is the simply wishful thinking (bordering on delusion) under the guise of expert analysis.
This is even less true now than it was ten years ago.
A better question will be who will buy Sun.. I'm guessing Dell.
reminds me of DRM and tivo-like "contracts".
taking the software out of the hands of users...
one the one hand it helps the new users, prevents lots of common headaches/problems and helps in backing up.
but for all that positive effects it provides, what it asks in return is that you give up virtually all your control over your data/software/interaction.
that also means no more tinkering with the source and adjusting settings that they won't allow.
the other problem with this mentality is that it wants to become ubiquitous. they won't settle for small niche markets and the like. they know what kind of "benefits" it provides them. it will become the equivalent of STEAM for business and productivity applications.
no, the price is far too high in my estimation. i fear one day in the future people will want to hand over all their computer software/access to a remote entity. all the freedoms we enjoy today could become a relic.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
You describe the MAC OS X operating system and hardware system as well. Totally proprietary as well even though they use open source stuff in the system they are not open source.
Does this mean that Multics will make a comeback?
...that Sun was becoming a relic.
the majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their mobile phones
Reading web pages on a tiny phone screen about as appropriate and satisfying as using gravel as lubricant. And let's not even get into all the other things a computer can be used for that a phone's small screen and lack of a keyboard preclude: word processing, spreadsheeting, desktop publishing, database management and graphics, sound and video editing, to name just a few.
Sorry, but just because Sun doesn't have a meaningful stake in PCs doesn't mean having that stake is worthless.
It's the same old thinclient/superserver spiel.
The fact is that their are reasons why the PC will not become "obsolete" in the near future - games, the rise of the SoHo network with the various servers that the computers must operate (file server, print server, etcetera), processing power needed for the graphics/movies manipulation ad infinity.
When I do get more bandwidth, I don't want to waste it passing this type of data around - especially for net-servers that likely wouldn't have much more power/person ratio as my home PC.
The issue with the personal computer is that the current paradigm expects everyone to be a sysadmin. While similar to the Marines' "every man a rifleman" ethos, it works less well in the average Home/Office setting. Frankly, it leads to a lot of shot feet. "all right Bob, now flash the Bios... *BANG*"
When people say they're sick of the their PC, what they actually mean (from talking to a few of them), is that they're sick of having to worry about the balky innards. They just want to turn it on, write their letters, check out CNN, and play Hearts against the Novosibirsk Hearts League. However, if you ask them if they'd trade the speed, immediacy, and appearance of control that having their own PC versus a running a web-service on a dedicated, limited, device offers, they'll immediately say, "No". They also, as a rule, don't want eight devices each of which only does one job. So, we're back with PCs.
One suspects that what Zander is really offering is everyone having a SunRay on their desk, with massive Sun systems in the background pushing everything through the network pipe. I, as the de-facto sysadmin for the family, think this is a great idea, but I as my geekish self, don't. Personally, I think the first company/organization that comes up with a machine that includes the modern connectivity with the single-user OS experience of circa 1996 Mac/Windows is going to have a hit. It's finding someone to work out the iPod experience for the PC; connected, yet truly yours. Clean, unobtrusive, and dedicated to its function. Maybe everything that makes a PC yours kept on an iPod-Nanoish device, which is docked to a PC, and allows it to run. Without your card, it doesn't run, and with your card, it only runs your programs, and only stores your data, so other users can't infect you. Every tub on its own bottom computing.
On the other hand, maybe we'll finally get fibre to the curb, high-speed, redundant links to the network, so you'll always be on, and there's enough bandwidth so that remote content appears like local content. Then Zander, Gates, et al., will be proved right, but until then, I think the general-purpose PC is here to stay.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Look at the cost of a cheap Dell these days - the fact is you can't make a thin client much cheaper than a low end PC. And while much of what we do with PCs might in the future be doable with thin clients, not all of it will be - you can't play decent games on a thin client, for example. There's just no reason for the end user to not buy a full-feature PC, and it will be a long time before we think of them as relics.
Oh no... it's the future.
Companies with something to gain from the PC being a relic have been pulling out this dead horse of an idea and beating it to death nearly annually. Need I mention ye old Network PC? Or Sun's own JavaStation?
Imminent death of the PC predicted! News at 11!
Yawn.
if you're in the mood to purchase a non-relic
I used to build PCs for fun but I haven't been interested in them for years. apart from playing the very latest 3D first person shooter there is just no point in buying a PC when a laptop offers so much more.
at home I use my laptop as a desktop with wireless internet, keyboard, mouse, speakers and plugging in a large monitor.
Can you play Battlefield 2 on a mobile phone? No?
Can you type out long reports on a mobile phone quickly? No?
Can you lodge a tax return on a mobile phone? No?
There's more to a PC then just browsing the internet fool.
On some scale or another, this guy is correct. Web services are becoming very popular. But as we can see from the list he's provided, all of the major web services are giving their users something that they wouldn't be able to find in a normal computer application. I think it will be a long time before we see desktop applications such as, for isntance, Powerpoint, get replaced by a web version.
But before web-ified desktop applications become popular, I for one think that we'll need something better and more integrated than AJAX. XUL and XAML are a good step in that direction.
A wise man once said, "wtf h4x."
You should have just bought a WebTV! I mean, who needs anything else?
"Sun's claims of the PC's eminent extinction themselves now relics."
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
But we still need a net based text editor (aka Word) in order to make any network computer feasable.
FCKeditor is getting there. It's obviously not got anything near the features of a PC-based program, but it will do for simple processing.
What an idiot.
http://pinopsida.com
Wannabe futurists (and some certified futurists) have been yacking about how the "PC is dead!" for the last 10 years, and they have been wrong. Will the PC become stripped down a bit in favor of more web based applications? Sure, but with memory and processing power so dirt cheep, the sheer economics of the PC architecture mean that there is no compelling reason to move applications or computational power off of the desktop/pocket and onto a server. The future model will probably be a hybred- you will buy a PC loaded up with feature rich applications that run client side, but those applications will be managed and automatically updated by a server.
Saying that the PC is dead in favor of a cell phone is patently absurd however. Cell phones offer such a highly limited user experience because of the screen size and input limitations. Yes, you can do some powerful things with a cell phone and you can receive real time updates on relatively thin slices of very specific information (stocks, weather, sports scores, traffic) and you can have limited "txt bsd comms via SMS." You will never really be able to learn a huge amount about new subjects via your cell phone, you will never be able to create and publish significant content on a cell phone, you will never have a rich and immersive media experience on a cell phone.
Finally, there is the carrier politics. This probably effects the US more then the rest of the world, but the cell providers have been the biggest impediment to cell phone technology. They have dragged their feet on rolling out new, high speed networks. They have indicated a desire for megalomaniacal control of all the content that goes onto each phone. They lock users into their crappy services with contracts and vastly overpriced hardware (a Palm costs $200, but slap a cell phone module onto the back of the Palm and it is now a $600 device, how does that work?).
I haven't read the article, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the company that owns Java, Solaris, and all of their other client/server stuff (or "solutions" if you prefer buzzwords) would say that sorta thing...
I have freaks! I did something right...
Considering how much it pisses me off when a power outage severs me from my data and services, I don't really want to rely on any other outside connection for my machine to run.
Do you see what I did there?
Personally, I think there's a middle ground here. Basically, I'd like sort of a "home mainframe", and a bunch of terminals around the rest of the house. I've got maybe 5 computers in my home, and like you said, they're all 99% idle most of the time. If I could condense all of that down into one box, it'd be great. I'd hopefully be able to access the same desktop from any room(terminal) in the house, when I decide to replace/upgrade hardware, I only have to do it once, and I only have one computer to administer. But most importantly, all my personal data and files are still somewhere that I physically control. Such a system would need to be a little different than today's PC's, but it wouldn't require the complexity or performance of corporate mainframes or anything like that.
I guess you could run into the problem of more than one terminal doing really intensive stuff at the same time, but maybe since I'm only buying one box, I can spend a little extra and put some nice hardware inside to mitigate that problem. As it is, only one of the five machines that I have now is anywhere near state-of-the-art, so it wouldn't be that much of a difference anyways.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
If you simply use your PC to "do e-mail and the internet" then yes, I agree that the PC is rather ill-suited to the task. There's a vast amount of wasted capacity if you're only running an internet browser on your PC.
However, the PC is also a platform for a variety of other things:
For the sake of redundancy, I'll mention that the PC-less world relies much more heavily on bandwidth than the market currently provides at reasonable cost. PCs are primarily a storage device, and until you get another system with adequate cache to store all of the things that you want to keep after you download, you'll probably be stuck using a PC.
If you're an avid gamer, then you're definately putting a much larger portion of your PC to work than the "average" user described in the article. It does seem that consoles are becoming much more powerful in terms of delivering games than PCs are, but they are much less flexible at this point and don't support user-modded games, maps, addons, etc.
If you're a media fan, then the PC offers you speed, reliability, and flexibility that the internet world does not. Granted, you can get your music online, but I'm sure we all sleep much better at night when we know our favorite music is on our PC and not going anywhere, rather than being subjected to the whim of our ISP or whatever site we stream from.
The internet is a growing market for just about everything. Unfortunately, it also means that greedy people are starting to catch on, and there will be more and more pricetags for online services in the years to come. It doesn't cost me anything (aside from the electric bill of course) to play a song that's on my hard disk, but the internet is not so friendly (and I expect that it will become less-so as time goes by).
Streaming videos just don't rival the quality of a DVD at this stage. If you were able to compress a stream and still maintain quality at a reasonable rate, you'd still need a processor on the end-user side to decode the stream. There's also the issue of bandwidth and transportability of media. I can take a DVD with me to the room downstairs or even out of state on a plane and it never loses quality because the signal gets bad or my connection changes.
While the news, e-mail, forums, information, etc. may becoming increasingly internet-specific in terms of its execution, there's still a great deal of use for a PC. I'm certainly not going to give up my hard drives any time soon (xbox 360 can go to hell).
So what's the motivation for all of the internet stuffs, from an industry perspective? What you do online, they can see. What you do on your PC, they can't. Unless installing spyware becomes the new fad soon, that's not going to change. It makes much more sense from a business perspective to have all of your applications in the same place you have your data-collection--online.
Until the internet gets a Ctrl-S, I don't think I'll be giving up my PC. I can't count the times I've lost a lengthy post to the evil internet. And I like being able to keep my media out of the clutches of some greedy CEO as well.
If you spout enough of them to your advantage, you may convince yourself that your path is always true!
How the Hell am I supposed to see pr0n on a 2" Screen?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
but that's not what the nice man from Sun is saying. He's saying that PC's are obsolete
What would you give up first? MS Word bloatware or your internet connection? Your screaming new box is overkill for the web.
(OK, games don't count)
Yes - of course that's the case.
But even if that did happen - I don't see Sun making super-cheap end-user web appliances - and any kind of big centralised server is just as likely to be made by Dell or IBM as it is Sun. Those other companies are flexible enough to survive and prosper over any hypothetical cross-over period.
The one kind of company that WOULD prosper if the PC were somehow to become obsolete would be network providers. The need for insanely broadband networks would leap if this ever happened.
But I don't think it's going to happen...at least not in developed countries. You have a hard time getting people to take public transport rather than driving their own cars...this is problematic for the exact same reasons.
However, in China, India...yeah...super-cheap Internet appliances could work.
But even so - it's hard to see where the savings are. If you are going to write serious documents, you still need a large, bright screen - a network interface, a printer and a full-sized keyboard and enough local intelligence to run those devices. By the time you've done all that, the extra cost for RAM and CPU to turn it into a PC capable of running Linux/OpenOffice/Mozilla is rather tiny.
Cutting out the hard disk and CD drive is certainly a do-able thing though.
www.sjbaker.org
Sun is pretty much a relic itself these days.
This space intentionally left blank.
Coding can be done using an IDE written in JavaScript that uses asynchronous HTTP requests (i.e. "AJAX") to communicate with an SSH session on the host machine. Nvu shows that web page design can run on the same codebase as a web browser. Imagine all the other possibilities that XUL or even AJAX can provide.
See "coding"; in addition see phpMyAdmin.
Really, the last thing I want is to be tied to a phone. They cannot become gimmicky enough for me to change my mind. If I want to take a digital camera with me, I'll take a digital camera. If I want to take an mp3 player with me, I'll take an mp3 player. All these silly phones remind me of that movie Gremlins; the geek dad inventor and his Bathroom Buddy 2000 or whatever it was called, which combined a toothbrush with about a dozen other bathroom oddities.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
People seem quite happy playing games on their TV (happier than on their computers) and TV's run a nowhere near 76Hz video at 1600x1200, mobile devices tend to have even lower resolution screens.
And don't forget that mobile devices aren't going to be completely, they will at least be able to use a compressed video stream and at best be able to run 50%+ of the application locally.
So, basically you figures bare no resemblance to the real world in any way what so ever.
I also doubt you $200 PC will cut it.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I thought this was great news for those in the market for a new PC relic, but after a little searching look what I found! A crappy, old fragment costs $380,000! That's just a motherboard, really, and they used to cost about $100. The NewEgg site (which hasn't yet been updated to consider PCs' relicdom) puts your CPU at a little over $350, which means that, proportionally, they're now more than one million, three hundred and thirty thousand dollars!!1 If you got your PC for less than six million, by God, you've been blessed.
This would be reasonable if everyone used desktop computers, which were always connected to a network with good bandwidth. But, the reality is that laptop computers have overtaken desktops, and the trend is increasing. When you have portable computers, you will not be able to assume ubiquitous bandwidth at a reasonable level. So, there will still be a need for the PC, OS, local apps, etc.
I, for one, like my pc. Network pc's have lots of problems. First off, there's performance. Bandwidth is a REAL limiting problem. Plus, LAN parties are pretty much out the window. I mean, who wants ping at a LAN party? There'll already be enough network traffic for just the game, and now you have to further bog down the network (I realize that if companies developed games to be specifically played on network computers, this problem would be eliminated, except that they won't, because, as of right now, the market for that audience is too small. Most home users don't have a network computer.) Next, there's security issues. With a pc, you turn off your computer, and your files aren't going anywhere (unless someone has physical access to the box). Network pc? Unless you have no connection to the internet, given enough time, any security will crack. (this should be solved through regular updates, but if you're not the admin, what are YOU going to do about it?)
Web applications- I'm not sure to what extent this term means, but I'm assuming that if he mentions eBay, Yahoo, Google, and Amazon, he means access to email, news, and shopping. Email is useful, and so is news and shopping...in America. I'm getting this feeling that his genius plan of bringing these services to Sub-Saharan Africa isn't going to work. Promoting of oss is great and all, but he's forgotten one teensy-weensy problem. These programs run on pc's.
Before you die, you see DoubleRing...
You have a hard time getting people to take public transport rather than driving their own cars
Only because public transport doesn't run at night or on Sundays or on federal holidays. Otherwise, given recent changes in gasoline prices, public transport has begun to look more and more viable to more and more people.
Really, it all comes down to porn. How happy can you get with a tiny phone display?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
If I was SUN I'd inform everyone that my competition was outdated again.
The world's smartest bug zapper www.zapstats.com/kickstarter
... because it's obviously bull. Try the following without a PC (or Mac equivalent):
... any one have any others? i'm sure you all do.
1) software development
2) music production
3) gaming
...is technology the only field where, when something has been growing in popularity for thirty years and then is almost an essential part of most people's daily lives, people start coming out of the woodwork proclaiming "the end is nigh!!!"? I've got an idea: show me five straight years of PCs declining in sales, use, and popularity before telling me it's soon to be a relic.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I think he meant to say... "Hardware: Sun President Says Sun's Desktop PCs Are Relics".
We recently dumped all their SPARC desktops (bought a year ago) for Intel PC's running Linux.
*doh* There goes his pricing model!
Console gaming.
I'm an independent video game developer. If the market for PC gaming were to evaporate, then how would I be able to distribute my games given that all major game consoles have closed bootloaders?
Sun has always been at war with Eastasia.
Welcome to 1995, the "Year of the Thin Client."
you can't play decent games on a thin client
Wouldn't Xultris run on a thin client that runs Gecko? Heck, there's even a JavaScript tetris clone. What makes a game "decent" other than (the smart-ass answer) that its graphics are at least as complex as those of Descent?
i don't understand why anyone listens to him. ok, well i guess some people have to listen to him, or read his drivel. but why would people take heed of what he says? i mean, how many more times can he say the pc is dead? isn't he like the bsd trolls?
hahahahahahaha, what the hell are they smoking over at sun?? I want some!!!
Just like retail is facing a death march, so is the PC, the TV, the phone, the iPod, the DVD player, the cable box, the newspaper, and so much more.
Convergence is not coming, its here. Its only going to get "worse."
Wireless broadband everywhere is just around the corner. Why store data on a PC or a LAN at all? Constant repair/upgrade/update/crash concerns. When 2Mbps wireless is truly a commodity, change will be imminent.
What data do YOU store? How about the average household? MP3? Movies on DVD? Thesis? Magazines in a bin for the past 3 years? Family photo albums? No, they won't disappear, not immediately.
Once that 2Mbps wireless is that commodity, data warehouses will be, too. No more backup concerns, no hardware-go-booms, no constant PC replacements. Just rent the space as you need it. Need more power? Its there.
Software rental (client-server thin networks) will be the next step. It will happen. No patching, no $250/year license for Ofiice 2006, no virus concerns, just pay-as-you-go. IT consultants beware.
The new TVs are just 1024x768 plasmas or LCDs. A $50 set-top box transcieves to Internet2. Your PDA will have the same access to your data as your home dumb terminal and office dumb terminal. All your contacts, movies, songs, personal and business data.
Why even buy music or movies? Pay-per-play!
Privacy? Few care. DRM? They're working on it for this future, not for piracy today.
Most home users don't have a network computer.
That is, unless they've installed one. XUL and AJAX apps over even entry-level residential broadband make you think you're almost using a local app.
... I'll know who to call.
In other news, Microsoft announced that operating systems with faulty security are the wave of the future.
Perhaps because the PC platform coupled with Linux is eating their lunch (and then some?)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
...but how about for work? Are we going to work on our cell phones?
...what Jon Schwartz has to say?
Sun is circling the drain, and he's a very big part of why that's happening. Moody's just downgraded their bonds to junk status, their stock is under four bucks (it started to crash right about the time they made him a VP), and all Jon has to say is nonsense like "Apple should use Solaris" and "The PC is a dinosaur".
Sun has been worthless ever since they started up the Java Hype Machine.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Sun Micro is the relic....
Does this mean that I should not buy one of Sun's new AMD64 based Ultra 20's? :)
- Play games
- Listen to my music collection
- Compile my programs and run my simulations
I would love to do all these things ONLINE instead of locally, because being 'ONLINE' is so cool and I don't mind paying for bandwidth I may not need because I want to be 'ONLINE' on the 'INTERNET'.About 20 years ago, I thought Sun workstations with their dual 68000 CPUs and SunOS operating system was leading edge! Now the whole company's a relic.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Sun are still hoping that the network computer becomes popular before they have to file for bankruptcy.
Even if it does, why would anyone buy it from Sun?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"We are defeating the infidels even as I speak, don't believe their lies - we shall make their sons fatherless and their computers shall all need rebooting!!"
I'm a Sun sysadmin and like their hardware, but Jonathan and Scott both tend to have wacky ideas. Some of their ideas are visionary, but most are just plain stupid. Given the ration of bad to good, I've learned to just ignore them.
BTW, whatever happened to "Bagdad Bob" (the real one) ? Is it true that he got a job at SCO as their information minister?
The individual PC in and of itself is certainly starting to die, but the future is in Home Servers and thin clients.
Family computing is going to be big. Your family server is going to handle your telepone service, Cable/digital TV, Home Security, Home messaging center, Digital Radio, Streaming Video, Home shopping, distributed TV and Music throughout the house.
The Home server will be multi-processor with extended service modules for broadcast TV reception, Digital Radio, wireless communications, Media recording and environmental controlls.
Spread about your house will be thin client TV's, Speakers, Telephones and Cameras. All your power sockets and light sockets will be smart and controlled by home central computing. All your power needs will be monitored and your electric meter read automaticaly and transmitted to the power company for billing.
There will be TV and Radio services that will be pay per use, while there will also be general public broadcast. General education will be wired in and students will have opportunites to attend school classes from home, submitt homework from home and even create homework webpages.
Everything else, all those internet servics will just be "data pumps", that push data that you want (and of course the inevitable unwanted data)
Large internet service providers are going to have to struggle to keep up with the content demands or die. Yahoo is just a web starting point, Google is just a search engine. The big money is going to be in the last mile wiring and the bulk pipeline. Web services are going to have to compete for bandwith to the home and only the premium and well delivered services are going to survive.
The average user of the future may not WANT to maintain his PC software environment in the face of constant security upgrades.
Low-bandwidth screen-remote-control applications like GoToMyPC and NX make this job much easier.
Unless you are watching TV or playing video games, a "black box" that connects to a server over dialup is just fine.
If you want to play games, or watch low-res TV, get broadband. If you want to watch high-res TV, get high-speed broadband.
About the only thing you need "local power" beyond what a "sealed black box" does is print and read or write local media.
10 years from now, 90-99% of Americans will have some way to get on the free Internet and subscription-based storage and applications at home. For many of them, it will be a "black box" to the network much like telephones were in my parent's generation. Others will be more like PCs of today, with local storage and local management. Many will have both types of "terminals" scattered around their abodes.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's safe to assume he's talking about entreprise PCs, since Sun really isn't in the home segment.
...
He has a point because most stuff companies do on regular PCs can be done just a well on NetPCs:
- Mail
- Web
- Office Apps
- Filling / querying databases, which most vertical "business" apps are,
is not bandwidth-intensive, nor CPU bound.
Having NetPCs saves a lot of trouble
- Everyone's stuff is accessible from any station
- Users cannot mess up their configs, lose their data...
- Security and confidentiality are better
I'm amazed at how much support a basic user (mail, web, Office, couple of databases) requires from the IT staff.
But
- Some users will still need PCs on the go, and the Internet is neither available everywhere, nor fast enough everywhere it IS available
- Some apps run much better on a PC (CAE/CAD...)
- Users will grumble endlessly if you take away their MP3s, games...
- I'm not sure the setup he advocates is more reliable than networked PCs, because any server or network issue brings everyone down
- Entreprise apps (SAP...) are not quite good enough in their web incarnation, when they have Web versions
So PCs + "Web services" may be a nice transition step. You have to support both modes at the beginning, and then you gradually phase out PCs where they are not required. And start buying lots of Sun servers and NetStations.
I'm not convinced, just trying to understand his message.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Sherman, My boy....
...please set the WayBack machine for 1997!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
For their witty advertising and engineering prowess of course!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
PC's are no more a relic than owning your own home. Does everyone go out and get rid of a house because of the wide availability of hotel rooms or apartments? No, of course not. A hotel doesn't have the room to store all your stuff, it allows limited if any personalization or customization, and in general the customer service sucks. apartments are only slightly better, but in the end they occupy the conceptual space of a laptop in the computer world. great for some people, but after awhile, you're going to outgrow it as a primary computer.
the future trend is going to be for every home to have one or two really big pc's (something we in the Industry refer to as "servers") that network everything from your tivo/pvr to your cell and cordless phones to ultralight tablets and laptops, and make the data stored on those servers ubiquitously available.
Bhwaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Needless to say he's wrong.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Let's see their was Nobody will need anything faster than a 286, And the famous PC's will never need more than 640k of ram. Plus many other idiot sayings that couldn't be farther from the truth between then and now. Now we have the current idot saying "Pc's are relics LOL.
I guess it's true what they say some people never learn.
Maybe one day when they come out with a cellphone sized device with the power of a pc expandability of a pc and is able to project a virtual screen the size of modern PC's along with either a full size projection keboard or 99.999% perfect voice recognition then yeah i could see pc's maybe becoming relics but not before then as their just to limited in the capabilities or lacking the ability to do the things that the broad range of people want and need to do and can only do on a real PC.
I couldn't ever think of playing a game or watching a video or my prerecorded shows on a little tiny cellphone or Ipod screen or anything similar as their just to tiny to be useable for such things, And gaming consoles and PVR boxes sure while all fine for certain console games they just aren't as flexible as pc games or several PC based apps for PVR or anything else that people would want to do outside of what Corperations etc would want to let you do like moded games in the vein of Quake, Unreal and so-on.
I wonder how long it will be before MS and Google will be fighting over who get's the failed Sun company.
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
You're making the assumption of a central server for these apps, and that's not a good assumption these days. Multiple servers where the services figure out what you need from where is a much better way to handle things.
The other thing is that you assume that all the processing is going to go to happen on a different machine, and streamed to a web appliance. That might be want Schwartz meant, but assuming that there isn't any data storage on a cheap device isn't a good assumption either. I mean, you can get gigs of storage inexpensively right now, so if it's inexpensive, why not put that on the machine as well...but as a cache, not as your main storage.
The third thing is you can't assume that apps will built the way they are now. Streaming data to a web device the way that's been described is nothing new. X-Terminals did this years ago. There are smarter ways of doing this now.
Hasn't Sun been saying this for like...10 years or something? The whole "The computer is the network" thing...
-Amalcon
Was that obsolete for you too?
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Keep in mind, he is talking about "poorer areas" and 3rd World countries who don't have PCs to begin with. Mobile phones are cheap and while people aren't going to be doing major computing tasks on small-screens, most don't have computers at all but have access to phones.
There are countries in Africa where cell phones are proliferating rapidly because the cost of infrastructure and access is magnitudes cheaper than wiring up the bush.
As far as the "can't use a cell phone to write home to mom" argument goes, it needs to be though of in a different context. Joe User dictates the letter into his cell phone. Delivery is determined by the address entries in the phone. Phone number = voicemail. E-mail address = e-mail. Physical address = printed and posted. Way back when, online giant CompuServe used to print e-mail messages out in the POP nearest the recipient and post them for a surcharge over postage.
No, every computing task can't be handled that way but the point is to not be constrained by current methods and methodologies. Network centric computing isn't a 100% solution, even Sun recognizes that on their SunRay page where it says it isn't suitable for 3D applications. Then again, no technology is a 100% solution -- just ask those who relied on telephones for all their communications down in New Orleans recently.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It might be a relic, but I call it a "holy relic"!
Sun's been making these claims for at least five years, because that's when I had done some research on the subject and found an article in the WSJ where Sun was all about the server and Microsoft was all about the client.
Five years later, Microsoft is still a leader (market-share wise) but it's future looks shaky, and Sun's future still looks shaky as well. The truth of the matter is there will never be an all-server or an all-client world.
This is one more way for Sun to get press. It's nothing new.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Can you access these Web services without a PC and still have a decent experience?
Or, are we all meant to replace our actually-useful-for-more-than-surfing-the-web boxes with dumb terminals? Maybe, they say everything old is new again.
As someone pointed out earlier, there's simply not enough bandwidth (and I really doubt there ever will be) to move ALL of the apps people use to the Web or a grid computer we access through the web.
Right now, I have to wait for apps on my local box to spin up and god help me if I actually multi-task on several memory intensive apps, can anyone seriously believe this will be better? Can you imagine the pain while waiting for the refresh on a large spread sheet to update?
Anyone who's running Win XP or Linux can get a sneak peek of what this experience would be like right now. Pick your best machine, boot it up and remote desktop or VNC to it over a modem. Enjoy.
R(k)
STOP BASHING SUN YOU KIKES
Mobile phones are the ones that are about to become relics. They're just too annoying to survive much longer. There are offices here in Silicon Valley, including some that do web development, that *ban* cell phones from the premises. Indeed, more and more places that you would want to take a cell phone to are starting to prohibit their use. Cell phones are like cigarettes, they're out of fashion, they bother the people around you, and they give you cancer. Pretty soon, if you want to use a cell phone you'll have to expect to do so only when you're outside. I can see PDAs eventually grabbing a large share of web usage, but not cell phones.
If all you want is a boot-from-BIOS-to-remote-control app like XDM, Citrix, or Windows Remote Desktop, then you don't need much:
A screen, a keyboard, a mouse, a slow CPU, no more than 128MB of RAM, boot media or network-boot capability, and a network card. A low end PC for the typical home user needs 256MB RAM and a 40MB hard disk and MS-Windows XP Home Edition minimum. That's another $20 in hardware and probably $50 at volume-OEM prices.
Plug that into your network, wait a minute or two, and you are at a login screen.
Total cost in mass production, not counting marketing, warranty, and other post-production costs:
Probably under $50, not counting monitor.
Monitor: $50 for new 15" CRT, significantly more for LCD screen.
Make these babies, sell them for a reasonable markup minus a 90% rebate valid only with a two-year services agreement, and profit.
AOL and the other companies that did this a few years back screwed up by not making the price close to free WITH a services agreement and expensive without one.
For corporate users, sell them at a reasonable markup and tout the cost savings that thin clients provide, and hope the CIOs don't get wise and say to themselves "hmm, can't we just turn our existing PCs into thin clients?" Too bad Microsoft charges a lot for client licenses.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
only old people use PC's.
:)
sorry, had to say it.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Scientists have discovered aliens living in the executive office suites at Sun Microsystems headquarters. These strange creatures require methane to survive, fear daylight, and thus spend 99% of their lives with their heads inserted in their own rectums. The aliens remove their heads from their rectums only to make pronouncements about the way computing is done on their own homeworld, where fiber-optic cable occurs naturally instead of dirt, and stale RISC processor designs run twice as fast as their contemporary x86 counterparts.
Dont get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of "the network is the computer" and all that jib-jab. But if web services is the great extent of it, count me out. Web services is fine for checking your email, but theres a world of real work which needs to be done at a near-OS level to create a distributed computing environment. Plan9, IBM's SoulPad, Synergy, these are the few and the brave willing to go out and fsck around with the traditional concept of a computer, to unweave the ideas of one computer, one monitor, one mouse, one system. To reduce network is the computer to WS-* is just a wretchingly awful idea.
The human-computer-I/O needs to be made network capable. I'll get back to you on it.
Myren
But they all boil down to: 'once again, Schwartz is spewing bullshit'
It has been since the earliest days.
/.'ers do too.
Very few developers in the '60s had access to the "console" most used terminals.
Telnet turns your PC into a glass tty, which was the norm for Unix before X came along. Talk about a thin client.
I use full-screen remote control to code all the time, and I'm sure many other
Now, music, fast-video games, and a few other things do typically require "being there."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
These Sun jerkoffs have been whistling past the graveyard for years. If they're so smart why is their stock selling for about what it sold for in 1998? Scott the Pig-Faced Boy & Co. have been snidely saying that everyone else is wrong and they're right for so long it's ridiculous.
Insert witty sig here.
Sun, MS and all the other large corporate players forget that freedom is the most important feature of any computer. The PC revolution was about finally having a powerful computer that you could do what you wanted with. Anything. Games, Business, Art, Music (ok, not on a PC until relatively recently), whatever it was that you wanted to - the PC was yours.
It started when suddenly you could choose a computer from a bevy of different manufacturers that could run the same software and even accept the same upgrades and accessories. The universe of possibilites was huge!
It was the feeling you got when you looked at a $5 shareware rack and saw someone buying the program you wrote!
It was the feeling that busines people got when they saw that software like dBase and 1-2-3 eliminated repetitive clerical work that kept small business small and big business huge.
It was the feeling that small publishers got when their LaserWriter spit out the first copy of their 2,400 subscriber newsletter... and it looked as good as what any newspaper could print.
It was the feeling that kids would get when they typed RUN after building a simple game in GW-Basic (and grew into Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal and the amazing array of choices in development tools).
It was the feeling that somehow the world was smaller when you heard the chirp-chirp-buzz of your 2400BPS modem connect with a bbs.
It was being able to upgrade and modify and customize your machine, like you Dad did his car - to perform how you wanted it to and to do the things you wanted it to.
Now people like Schwartz say the PC is dead because big corporations want to "harness the power" of your cell phone, game console and PC and rent it back to you... Whatever. Useless. Clueless. People want freedom. Not walls, restrictions and tollbooths.
It's a matter of time until someone makes the PC of convergent cell phones - one where the user has control, the software stack is simple, elegant and compatible, and there's no toll booths for developers. Users control it. Just like I do my PC.
And incidentally, Open Source software feels to me a lot like a continuation of the PC revolution - with one difference - this time we know that it's about freedom. Last time it was simply fun.
-- $G
I'd say that Sun and Mr. Schwarz will probably find themselves turning slowly in a line of helium-filled, glass-walled museum cases long before the personal computer does. Sun just hasn't given up on the idea of the Network Computer, I guess.
But hey. He's entitled to his opinion.
And what is this "Nuts and Volts of News for Nerds"?
I thought this was supposed to be "stuff that matters".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The point isn't that people want less PCs, it's that their phone is now more powerful than PCs back when PCs were more powerful than people needed. People still want PCs, more than even. They just don't want heavy beige boxes.
this what you mean?
http://www.ltsp.org/
When mobile phones get more than 640 Kilobytes of memory no one will want anything else... They have been saying crap like pcs are obsolete for years. Just because habits change doesnt mean one device necessarily replaces another but rather complements it and both will find a place and existance if truely usefull. Just look at linux for the most recent example.
Sun's been thinking of thin clients, when they should be thinking of fat clients. Jennie Craig has made millions with her fat clients.
Spokesbossy for ominous cow herds everywhere.
MS has never touched the box and it's running just peachy.
Trolling is a art,
Okay, Jonathan. What are we supposed to use? SunRays? Do yourself and your company a favor: find a buyer. RedHat, Oracle, IBM, HP, even MSFT, would be better than the lunatic culture cheered on by Scott McNealy and his flacks.
The thing I find the funniest about all of these articles talking about web services being microsoft's downfall, is how much microsoft pushed web services in the beginning. Anyone remember that whole .NET thing? One of the core aspects of that was web services. In fact ms was the company that laid out the SOAP standard. They must really have lost control of that ball, because now anyone you hear about doing web services is probably doing it with Java.
So the question becomes, which was the stupider mistake for ms, starting the whole web services thing rolling, or losing control of it shortly thereafter?
You're on Slashdot: you're probably not giving up your PC. But you're not the target market for this change.
Take away the PC and replace it with (say) an iPod, a console-with-DVD-Player and a SunRay (The thin-client device that Sun is pushing.) Assume that the SunRay has some sort of reasonable connection (say, twice the speed of an ordinary DSL line) and that Google starts offering some sort of "GDesktop" web application service
(I know, a lot of ifs.)
The iPod would provide about the same music experience as a PC. The DVD player in the PlayStation, connected to a TV, would give a better video experience than the PC. Console vs. PC gaming is a personal choice; call it a toss up.
This hypothetical consumer is "free" from having to maintain, troubleshoot, upgrade, or replace a PC, yet he or she gets all the utility, and possibly more, for less money up front.
It's Microsoft's worst nightmare. This is why Microsoft hates Google: because it fears web services could be divorced from PCs. It's why Microsoft makes a console system. It's why Apple makes iPods and sells music online.
Microsoft wants your desktop, TV, game console, car, music player, and vacuum cleaner to be differently shaped PCs running Windows. I really hope that never happens.
I like having my own system. But many people don't, and many would be better served by discrete devices.
(And incidentally, I don't work for any of the companies listed herein, nor am I paid to endorse them.)
I was thinking about buying some Sun stock while it's so cheap, on the off chance they can really come back like Apple. Not while this dude is in charge, though! He reeks of "We're going all out to embrace the latest buzzword so Wall St. will like us." (OK, not exactly the latest buzzword for Sun, but still.)
What % of software makes any sort of sense as a web app? Commerce web sites (if you call them that), email (not very good compared to a local client), central database access programs, and services like Google and eBay. Given the networking, etc, available in the foreseeable future, forget about graphics, software development, most games except the MMORPG's, and any sort of Office product used for even remotely sensitive data. The only web apps that compete for productivity are based on applets or ActiveX controls, i.e., instead of installing a word processor, you download and use it, slowly and painfully, in a web browser.
Most advocates of web apps are MS and their wannabees, who are mostly interested in finding ways to charge for usage since they can't keep producing compelling upgrades.
It's true that a lot of people would be okay with a thin client (i.e., all they need is eBay), but a thin client is still a PC: it still needs a video card, a monitor, a CPU, a reasonable amount of memory, some sort of mass storage. There is little point in buying a stripped down thin client, when full featured PC's are so cheap. I admittedly don't own (or plan to own) a cell phone, but I can't imagine anyone using one for internet access beyond MapQuest and very, very basic email (want to wade thru a few hundred spams on a 3" screen? I don't even want to answer email on a phone keyboard.)
If Sun ever succeeds with this, it will be in places like China where forcing people to keep all their data on central servers makes sense for political, not technical, reasons. Maybe there's enough customers in China for this to work and make Sun some money.
But I doubt it.
U know, I know, we all know that Sun is a relic.
Your ego is Matrix!
He's obviously never played Counter-Strike...
Slashdot, the center of all PC news and commentary, said that Sun is increasingly becoming a relic. Instead, what has become important are FPS Games on the Internet and the majority of the world will first experience the Internet through cheap $200 PCs.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Current dial-up speed: 26.4Kbps
IL, USA Zip Code: 62865
You want me to trade in my computer for a web appliance? Please find a way to deliver broadband (real broadband, not satellite) to me and I may consider what you have to say. Otherwise STFU.
Helloeee Hawiieeee
I dont know what PC means in this sense, but the local hardware machine will always have more bandwidth than whats available online, and so will always be more capable than what is online.
We've seen that in games. Online games are now quite sophisticated, but local run games have advanced much further. This gap will always remain. I've wondered about terminal services games, where the games are entirely run on servers, which have their own GPU farms, and the subscriber sees the game online at the full resolution and refresh rates (given the online bandwidth allows this). This way the subscriber might have a dumb terminal which might as well be a tv with a keyboard, and have pay per view access to any game, movie or application in the world. This should require staggering bandwidth, and even then the computers will be more advanced and capable, so new applications will require a local machine.
PCs in the sense of wintel machines are hardly different from other workstations now. The original PC was limited in their OS, graphics, internal bandwidths etc. But additional bolted on technologies have actually given PCs an edge. GPUs from ATI and nVidia, SATA harddrives, PCIX, DDR2 ram, 64-bit instruction set, MPU capability, OSes like BSD and Linux and now Solaris have blurred the lines between all workstations. Buying a PC now is the same as buying any workstation, only cheaper with more software base, OS options, hardware options and tech expertise. It is buying a Sun machine now that is not feasible, putting base CPU and OS architecture quality aside.
We can already run applications over the web, which are run on the server and the bandwidth is sufficient to deliver the app. Think of any citrix app, or web apps. We cant run ALL apps online yet. Maybe thats why Sun with their web-centric view isnt making a profit yet.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I swear I've been hearing that song, and usually from Sun, for the last 15 years. The verses and lead singer may change, but the refrain always starts out "the PC is dead". Funny...I don't see any of the PC manufacturers, especially the ones who make notebooks, singing along.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
He talks about mobile phones. Neat, everyone loves them, but seems to neglect to mention that mobile data costs are insanely high, that they suck at such things are output and input of data, that the few that are slightly capable cost as much as a fat PC. That so far every mobile phone company has been more intrested at selling wallpapers at 1 euro a piece rather then allowing their customers full and unrestricted access to the real web. That the number of websites that can be rendered on succesfully on all but high end nokia's can be counted on the fingers of one hand. That the idea of doing wordprocessing on a mobile phone would have any non-japanese teenage girl cringing in pain.
And where are those central web-based applications really going to run? At sun headquarters? Oops well the current office I work at can't use it then, I think the dutch goverment has some rules about sending data on social security users outside the office, let alone to another country. America might be more lax with personal data but not over here.
Think about this for a moment, google does NOT ensure that your data remains your data. Do you really think big companies are going to swallow that with all their documents?
Then there is bandwidth, most company networks are already croaning because upgrading everyting from 10mbits cost a lot of money. How do you think they are going to like it if suddenly their 10.000 users are going to be surfing the net fulltime? I think many a office just doesn't have the kind of network to cope.
I could go on and on. I could mention the cost difference between a fat client running decade old software VS a thin client with a annual fee is very much in favor of the fat client. (I really don't want to pay MS or SUN for using office software from 95 wich is ALL I need).
I could point out that SUN has been saying the same thing for years and it never been true and never will be true.
In fact all that has changed is that SUN since they started with the thin client concept (after the fat clients became the standard) is that SUN has become increasingly irrelevant. The fact is simply that what SUN wants to happen is to go back to the old days of mainframes and terminals. We had those once, we had a reason we switched to the current setup. I don't think we are going to go back anytime soon. Not because of computer games or because we really want PC's to do everything but simply because even for office applications it is cheaper. Blame intel and others for making PC's so goddamn cheap they are now given away for free with your mobile phone. Mobile phones with access metered by the MB and 1 euro wallpapers are not going to replace free pc's with free software and unmetered access anytime soon.
Funny thing, those mobile phone applications that really work? Games and route finders? All locally installed software. What webbased software do people really use on their phones?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Take away the PC and replace it with (say) an iPod, a console-with-DVD-Player and a SunRay (The thin-client device that Sun is pushing.) Assume that the SunRay has some sort of reasonable connection (say, twice the speed of an ordinary DSL line) and that Google starts offering some sort of "GDesktop" web application service
It seems to me like most of this stuff will end up costing more than a PC. And that I would say, is what the business side of the deal would like. Not to mention that since they tag everything separately, they can add additional "upgrades" to each so that you actually get less bang for your buck overall.
As you mentioned, /.ers are not the targets. The old traditionalists are the targets. But how long are these people going to be around? Kids these days have grown up using PCs, digital cameras, etc., and most are probably more tech savvy than their parents. When the current CEO generation dies off, they'll be replaced by today's youth.
From the marketing folks at Dell, Intel, and others, I see their projected use of the PC as this:
You've bought 8 digital devices, now you need a way to connect them all. Use your home PC to do that!
Now a web-based system of communication between 8 different devices could work, but at this point it seems that it would be an excessively complicated infrastructure when compared to plug-n-play. Until you get a microchip implanted in your head that will link up with all of your accessories, I think you'll be needing your PC to do that instead.
Larry Ellison had the same idea about the PC several years ago, and was completely then too. He underestimated how cheap PCs would become and the fact that people want local storage.
...is that if you want to make money, it is useless to target the PC. The PC is dead as a target when it comes to commercial application development.
He isn't trying to replace your PC, he's trying to explain why companies just aren't developing PC software anymore.
All the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet. (Games are one of the big exceptions, but even PC games these days have to use the Internet in some way to be commercially viable.)
Paul Graham has been saying the same thing for some time. And I think they’re right!
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Ford president says the future of transportation is automobiles.
Fabio Aquotte
That cheesy ponytail he wears is one hell of a relic.
Sure the headline is "Sun President Says PCs Are Relics" but it should really read "Sun President Says PCs Are Relics...again. Nobody cares what he says...again".
Credibility questionable, Statement predictable. That's how Shockwave would say it if the president of Sun tried to pull this shit on Cybertron.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Ask anyone that had to use terminals to do some computing back in the day.
Do some work
Submit job
wait for error reports
fix up errors
submit job
wait for error reports
repeat
The day the PC became available, no one ever thought of looking back. My archaic PC is powerful enough to run as a server to a lot of web apps. It could handle an office of over 100 workers easy.
I should rather buy sun gear you say? Overpriced too?
That will kill the MS Behemoth?
The PC is a relic as long as you don't want to run applications that don't suck. Let's face it, all applications that run inside a webbrowser are inferior to those that run native on a PC. Webapps like GMAIL are getting better, but functionality is still far below an application that takes advantage of the local windows manager.
Haven't we been hearing this from Sun for about ten years now?
Ever since they came out with Java they've been touting the end of the PC, "the network is the computer" and all that. I guess they are hoping that if they keep saying it, it will come true
And his company hasn't been doing all that great on that premise in all that time. Maybe if Sun spent more time developing to the realities of computing rather than to their pipe dreams of what the IT world should be, they'd stop having to lay off all those employees. Not that the performance of the company particularly impacts upper management's fat paychecks...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Either he's a far-future visionary or this explains why Sun's stock keeps plummeting.
I didn't happen in 1994, it didn't happen in 1995,...
Sun has been touting the "the network is the computer" mantra for the last 10 years--hurrying from failure to failure (anyone remember the SunOne?). I've had the dubious pleasure to attend three or four SunERCs over the last decade and this was the keynote speech each and every bleeding time. Beginning in 1999 or 2000, you could hear exasperated groans throughout the audience.
Some technical reasons
-Wireless broadband simply isn't there yet. And it might never be if you are outside of major cities and away from interstates. Hell, I can't get my cell to connect half of the time when I am on vacation. (Vail, southern New Mexico, large parts of Arizona, even here in Illinois, you can loose cell coverage by taking any exit on I-57 and driving 3 miles). And don't get me started on roaming charges.
-People want to own stuff. Otherwise, we'd all take trains and busses. The same argument applies there:more efficient, more reliable, you don't have to check your oil, rotate your tires, or take them to the shop.
-Joe Sixpack will never store their porn on a Sun server.
He's right that a lot of people in developing or emerging countries will first see the Internet on their cell phone. China, for example, has 300 million or so cell phones and far fewer internet connections. But the user experience on a cell is an unmitigated pain in the ass. The other thing that will keep wireless and online use from making the PC obsolete is the greed of wireless providers--if your cable is $50 a month, imagine what cable+wireless+free software is going to be. Since the cost of computer hardware is now marginal (new Dell==6 months of Internet connection), why wouldn't someone buy a PC, no matter what s/he can do on his/her cell?
I really liked Sun for a long time, but they DO desperately need a change in management. If not, I'll welcome our new Dell/Sun rack server overlords.
What Sun doesn't understand, and what you don't seem to understand either, is that client side processing is cheap. For example, why do you need a web based text editor when your existing PC can handle it just fine? Why buy a $500 thin client when a $200 PC has a hundred times the functionality?
My work has a network with a bunch of aging Sun Solaris workstations and a bunch of Dell Windows systems. Due to the lack of brain activity in our IT department, we've decided that web applications are the way to go. The result: half the web apps can't be used by the Sun workstations because they require the Internet Explorer (someone experimented with the IE for Solaris, but the results were unreliable), and the other half of the web apps are clearly inferior (slower, nastier interface, etc) to the local client versions.
JS wants thin clients because he wants centralized control. It's a valid viewpoint, but it's only applicable to a few situations. It sounds great to IT because they only have to install the text editor once. But the users will hate it, and the user is king, no matter how godlike IT thinks it is.
Yesterday, Friday evening, as everyone is trying finish out their timesheets so they can go home for the weekend, the online timesheet webapp crashes. If that's the future of computing, you can keep it.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
this is what sun wants of of course it's going to be how they are going to predict the future. sun sells sever hardware, so if everyone ditched desktop pc's tommrow sun wouldn't give a damn. of course they aren't going to do anything but predict things that will help their business. unfortunately for sun their predictions are getting furthur and furthur from reality. i would say a much much more likely future is one where most corperate users take home lap tops and use them to remote connect to work, but hardly a desktop webbased future.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Oh wait, this is coming from a corporate blowhard mouthing off to the media in hopes that his relic of a *company* can stop the bleeding in time for him to cash out some options? Any Sun engineers need a job? My company's already hired 16 of your former colleagues in the past six months.
For their witty advertising and engineering prowess of course!
Dude, I'd mod that funny if I had the points..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They are idle 99% of the time, but many probably also don't want their information stored anywhere else because of how personal computers are becoming in our lives. They store our books, our music, our journals and diaries, our communications... they store our entire lives. Would you trust that to anyone? Especially the kinds of people like the RIAA or MPAA or Microsoft?
NEVER!
So we still keep our PERSONAL computers, but when the resources of our computer are idle we allow those resources, not our personal content, to be used by everyone. Like a great shared computing project for all humankind while still keeping some of it for ourselves.
What you think yo?
and I'd argue that games are niche application. When your parents, your sister and you grand parents play FPSers, then I think your argument would stand. However, they don't, so standard broadband will suit most applications that most people actually use. The only bandwidth intensive application that your parents, your sister and your grandparents would possibly use today is video conferencing, and broadband already privides enough bandwidth for that, even with lower than TV frame rates. Just seeing the other person, even if it is only 10 times a second, adds a lot of value over just pure audio aka VoIP.
The evenual market for "fully-powered" desktop PCs may only be gamers - and they'll be called "games consoles".
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
And in other news: "Sun CEO has no friends"
or...
"Sun CEO a relic, says Slashdot"
:-D
Breakfast served all day!
I hadn't looked at this before, so I realise this could just be stating the obvious...
m &q=l&c=
m &q=l&c= ... but in comparison, MSFT has managed to hold steady throughout this extended period without a release. Looking at early to mid 2005, one can see the effect that market expectations had for the release (and open-sourcing) of Solaris 10. But the chart shows that this was remarkably short-lived. One would expect that if Solaris had taken off (not saying it hasn't - the jury's still out on that) the revenue from support contracts and such would have continued this growth (obviously). This hasn't happened - as can be seen.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SUNW&t=my&l=on&z=
I thought MSFT was looking bad (especially post-Ballmer in 2000)...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MSFT&t=my&l=on&z=
My dear father told me that an investment in stocks should be made only when prospects for long term returns are self-evident (e.g. at least 15 years from now). Generally speaking, sensible investments are not based on the promise of start-ups or great new products from an established company with the intention to sell those stocks within a few years for a quick buck. It seldom happens like this. Surprisingly, many people think this is how the stock market works. They use words like 'gaming' the market and such. But it *really* isn't gambling as so many people say. Invest in resource sectors (mining and energy) or financial institutions. Hold on to these. Expect them to mature over at least twenty years.
My father also said not to waste your days paying attention to daily market analysis and news (unless you're buying). If you have bought the right shares, it doesn't matter what happens over the course of a few days, weeks, or months - you're holding on for that twenty year plan. Think in the long term. Thrift. Discipline.
Actually, I think 60Hz is plenty =)
You can play games at 640x480 just fine, although it sucks now a days compared to what many people run including 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 on an HDTV. Bit this is really besides the point. The client machine needs to do the processing, and that means a PC right now and for the forseeable future.
I do agree with this guy to an extent - for many people, it's the Internet that's important. Whenever my cablemodem goes out it almost feels like the electricity goes out. Maybe in the future, you'll still buy a fast machine but everything will bootstrap off the Internet.
I think it will be a long, long time before the PC is phased out. They're very versatile and it's going to be decades before most of us get REAL network connections. And less we not forget that we need really strong computers for all the client-side work.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Kirby
The Sun President also claims, "The network is the computer."
Like I would trust my data to a terminal server (of any brand/encryption) unless I owned it. Aside from security concerns: how much would a subscription to extreme high bandwidth++ service cost? How much would a spot on a server with 1 gig RAM .5TB disk space allocated to just me cost....per workstation? Chances are these answers are $bigmoney / month. That's a monthly cost compared to a one-time cost. It would boil down to $technology replacement every 3-5 yrs vs $rental. Right now that falls on the side of the replacement.
Forget the legal liability that they just won't encumber for me to load DeCSS for personal media backups or some of my non-DRM ripped mp3s of CDs I own. Are they going to administrate my domain schema? is that extra? how fast can I do an ADSI hack when needed?
Try this one: Your entire office is offline because a storm has knocked out power to a poorly designed upstream NOC. You sell generators and have none of your client records or inventory database. Unless google's running these systems with their 3 shard techniques, I'd rather do it myself. Then I know that if it breaks I've already planned for it or my site is destroyed and it's my own fault for not co-locating enough.
Wow! Sun has never ever claimed anything like THIs before! /sarcasm
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
We hear this every couple of years. Who remembers when Sun was pushing 'thin client' web applications delivered as java applets to the brower.
The desktop PC, running windows, linux or MacOSX will continue to be useful. Having power like that directly in the hands of end users can't be replaced.
What will happen is that new applications paradigms that only make sense because of the Web will emerge. We have already seen some of that.
Peace, or Not?
"When people say they're sick of the their PC, what they actually mean (from talking to a few of them), is that they're sick of having to worry about the balky innards. They just want to turn it on, write their letters, check out CNN, and play Hearts against the Novosibirsk Hearts League."
And yet Linux still hasn't taken over the desktop.
"However, if you ask them if they'd trade the speed, immediacy, and appearance of control that having their own PC versus a running a web-service on a dedicated, limited, device offers, they'll immediately say, "No"."
There's nothing preventing one from having a remotely administered "non-balky innards go voom, voom" Xserver in the basement, and Sun "don't eat my desktop" rays* around the house. Connected with Giganet.
"They also, as a rule, don't want eight devices each of which only does one job. So, we're back with PCs. "
That's the niche that Network Appliances are currently filling.
*For those on the cheap. Replace Sunrays with consoles.
Waaaah! Linux is outselling Solaris. Well computers are all rubbish anyway. Ha. That told 'em.
"Now that you're sober, though, care to explain where all Microsoft's money keeps coming from?"
Vaseline sales.
This article was posted already in 1997... Remember, "The network is the computer"?
I don't think that's exactly the right idea. He's probably saying this because it's in the interest of his business, but why would we want to become more reliant on the Internet? We don't know when our connection could go down, and we'd be stuck, or if we'd even have a connection all of the time. You might be up in the mountains somewhere, with no Internet access, but maybe you'd still want to use your Powerbook to type a paper or something. If your word processing software is somewhere lese, then what good is this laptop for? Software, for the most part, should remain local to each machine, so that, in the event that the Internet isn't available, computers can still function the way that they were meant to.
Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsistem, has gone completely insane. News has it that he was taken out of a restaurant by security personel while he was yelling "THE PC IS OBSOLETE" and "WHY DOES NOBODY LIKE SOLARIS? IT'S GOT JAVA AND STUFF!".
Michael Dell had this to say: "Yeah, right".
i dont think the PC is old,it's the way we compute !!!
RUPERT! I TOLD YOU TO WATCH THE BAGS! You were looking at the boys again, WEREN'T YOU.
But we still need a net based text editor (aka Word) in order to make any network computer feasable.
In that case, check out Writely.
Writely is a web word processor that provides simple and secure document collaboration and publishing on the web using only the browser. It even allows you to import your Word doc files.
Could this be the Net Based Text Editor that you are looking for?
In God, I trust. On all others, I used dsniff.
Hasn't Sun been trying to sell the idea of "Java Terminals" (thin clients) since something like 1996? That is almost an entire decade.
Java is hardly "thin" these days, though. It is practically an operating system now. They just want to replace MS's bloated mess with their own bloated mess.
Table-ized A.I.
Even if the bandwith is available, is it really going to be cheaper to move everything to a central source? Processors are cheap, memory is cheap, harddrives are cheap. So even if I had a 10GigE connection (which is enough to handle realtime, high rez uncompressed video) what's the motivation? At most I'd store the apps themselves remotely, and then execute them locally. It would be less convenient and cost more money to build a massive centralized system rather than just have a bunch of individual ones.
We actually evaulated just this situation at work receantly. We had a lab with a bunch of Sunrays. That's Sun selling just what they are predicting. You have a large server (a V220 in our case) and a bunch of X thin clients that connect to it. Ok so the 220 was long in the tooth and seriously underpowered. Time to upgrade. The choices were to keep the 'rays and get a new server or to ditch them in favour of Sunblades. Our UNIX admin did some figuring and said that it was less than half the price to get 10 good blades as it would be to get a central server of the same power.
So if we went for the server, it would give more power available to a single user, but less if they were all being used. The blades had less power per user, but a consistent amount. It was a no brainer, it's now Sunblades in the lab.
Graphics worked fine for the 'rays, they had a fast dedicated network, it's just a matter that it's more expensive to build a really powerful single system than to buy smaller ones. This is even at all Sun prices. Had we not needed SPARC, we could have gotten even more power for the money with Dell.
I'm sure there's more Slashdotters out there that would agree with that statement as to which computing power is more of a relic, the general purpose PC or Sun...
Now, had he said that Windows will become a relic and the home market will be divided between Mac OS X and Linux over the next 5 years, I could buy that proposition.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
a.) on a PC right now
b.) other (describe below)
San Francisco Photographers
It's a fact that the parts and manufacturing effort required to build an XBOX cost less than the XBOX is sold for. The XBOX, then, is not sold for a loss. But what you are probably referring to is that the initial R&D time takes a long time to recover, and they partially use the cost of the games to cover that cost. Once the R&D is all paid off, I can guarantee that the console is no longer sold at a loss.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Yeah, yeah, McNealy already tried to sell us Network Computers with Larry Ellison five years ago. We have more bandwidth now, but some things still haven't changed, like the fact that people *like* their PC and they *love* having their local data on their own computer.
Yawn.
And I think Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit, Ahead, Sony, Mathworks, Autodesk, Mavis, Jasc and tons of others I left out would all agree. There's still plenty of market for PC software. Go to BEstbuy or Compusa some day, look at the massive amounts of PC software they have and not the games. It wouldn't be there if they weren't selling it.
The Internet is neat and all, and there's a lot of shit that it makes better and things it enables, but there's still plenty of market for stuff on your home computer. Some of the biggest would be word processing, digital imaging, and digital video.
And no, Sun is saying they think PC will go away. Actually they are saying they wish PCs would because they suck in the PC market and their marketshare in the high end keeps shrinking. Sun has had a hard-on for network computing forever. They are one of the few companies with a current viable solution for bussinesses to to NCs: Sunrays. Sun wants to see that in every house, people buy little boxes with no brains and then companies pay Sun millions for big servers for them to connect to so they can do something.
It's wishful thinking and nothing more. Hardware is much cheaper than bandwidth. If anything like that happens, it'll be game consoles becomming set top boxes and replacing computers (which is unlikely, but way more likely than NCs). Apps may come over the network, but processing and graphics will be done locally. When $400 (the alleged Xbox-360 release price) gets you a powerful system that does awesome graphics and so on and in most areas it $50 for 3-6mbps of cablemodem, which isn't enough to replicate those over the network, it's easy to see which way it's headed.
When there's gig or better fibre to most houses, then come talk to me and maybe I'll listen to the NC debate. Until then, it's Sun having pipe dreams. Of course by the time that happens, powerful hardware is likely to be cheap to the point that it makes more sense to have your own anyhow, and save the bandwidth.
This is one reason why .Mac sucks: Why would I want to store my personal stuff with them? And if I were to store it there, I wouldn't want a measly gigabyte for that price.
that my first PC was a 8086 with single-digit megaherz speed, no harddisk and almost no memory, and my smartphone has a 400MHz CPU, 128MB RAM and allows storage card upwards of a gigabyte. So, which is PC-er - this or that? (my fourth PC was a 486DX at 100 MHz with 32MB RAM and 320MB HDD).
A year ago I would have said this was complete flamebait. But after coming to Japan, I can somewhat see this guy's point: here in Japan many people (most, even) browse the net via cellphones. The phones themselves have big, sharp screens so as to be able to display kanji. And while games on phones are widespread, console caliber games (granted old consoles) are beginning to come out (the high end DoCoMo phones have Nippon Ichi and Square Enix games that look amazing).
But I seriously doubt the PC is going the way of the dinosaur. There is a value in having some kind of box (even in a lapop, which is as small as I think a normal PC will normally get - any smaller brings in different issues). You'll never be able to play the latest and greatest game on a cellphone or webTV and (while I don't understand it) there will always be people who want PC style games over consoles.
Plus, the feeling of a computer, even a laptop, docked in one area is far different from that of a cellphone or a TV in a common room.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
PCs are alive and well. You just have to pick the right one.
Any commentary on the initial cost of the XBOX is deliberately misleading. Even if you think it was $323 back in 2002 (which I highly doubt in the first place... a lot of the articles which said that the XBOX was sold below cost price were released by Microsoft themselves), do you think it would still cost $323 in 2005?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I'd like to see you put windows xp on a 40MB hard disk
(sorry, couldn't resist)
The last refuge of solitude (plug off the network cable) and privacy (if you want and particularly if you know how).
How many times are you guys going to post this?
"Plug-in and working thin clients that are solid-state and last for many years."
Let's wait until somebody actually offers a thin client at a lower cost than a PC, sells a few million of them and then we'll see a few years later if they are really easier to use, more reliable, virus-proof, and never need to be upgraded.
By the way, PC's are also solid-state devices since they don't contain vacuum tubes.
Straight out of the 10Q "Xbox consoles have negative gross margins." An additional thing you forgot is that MS slashed the price of the XBox. It is more than likely that any efficiencies they made in manufacturing the consoles could not make up for nearly halving the price. As you have not provided a cite to back up your claims I consider myself done with this.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
"And with it the market for PC software will shrink while the market for web applications and services will grow."
What are the 5 top-selling web applications and services? If you're not selling something in a market, you're not in that market. Companies like Google are really in the advertising business even if they use web applications to sell the ads.
Most real PC "innovaton" has been powered by the need of cutting production cost.
The whole "serial is better" is for instance due to the complexity of MB design... no one can say that 1 line is faster than 32 lines or 64 lines. Cutting compexity is cutting design time and production time.
The X86 has just been "pumped" up but but it wasn't "real" innovation... the innovation has been almost stopped due to the "need" for backward compatibility.
We have seen linear evolution not innovation and the evolution has allways been stopped when compatibility (and profit) was in danger.
The conclusion is that the reason for the lack of invention is the popularity of Windows...
I have to agree with the statement that the web services are becoming more important than the computer (or even the OS) iteslf. These days I rely very little on the actual OS of a computer: I usually boot off my FreeSBIE live cd, and do all of my work from there. My documents are stored either online, (oftentimes my documets are e-mails, other times I just leave them on an FTP server), or I can mount the NTFS partition on my drive and store locally.
Sure, I also boot into Windoze if I need to (play Heroes of Might and Magic IV), and then I can continue working, though Opera, the same way I did in FreeSBIE with Firefox.
Sigged!
This sounds mysteriously like predictions from 10 years ago, and 10 years before that, and 10 years before that. I don't think Sun was the one to make that prediction the first time, but they sure were making it 10 years ago. So far it just seems to keep getting less and less true. The network is not the computer. The network is the input. The computer is the computer.
There are quite a few problems with the remote-PC option. For one, latency is a killer which we can only overcome by client-side predictions, so most UI will be intollerably unresponsive without enough power to run things locally.
For another, just because the computer is physically remote doesn't mean the user doesn't have to administer it. It's still their 'GoToMy' PC. They can still screw it up, unless you're not going to let them install applications, at which point it becomes a bit useless as a computer. If users want autoupdating, why not just write software that autoupdates?
Third, we all know that network black boxes in this country come as tied to specific services. And we know that technology dongles like this fail.
Fourth, while some network apps have taken off, like webmail, others have failed miserably. Browser-based text editors come to mind. Some things you just want local.
And Fifth, with computers so cheap, why network? Where is the huge performance or convienience increase that would convince everyone to switch?
Latency basically kills the possibility of playing games over a black box even with high-speed broadband. You would need to do the kind of expensive client-side predictions currently in use to keep the game playable, at which point you would by definition have a client capable of playing the game.
But ultimately I think the basic problem is that people want to own their things. They don't usually want to lease their telephones, or rent their software by the year. When I buy a computer, I want that feeling of "well, i've got that computer problem solved." I want my private data on a local disk. I want to be able to kick something. I just don't see the compelling argument that would alter computing from the current independent model to a client-server model.
The ______ Agenda
Asinine comments like this is why Sun is down in the dumps. Instead of pontificating on stuff they don't know what they're talking about, why don't they get back to building great hardware at a great price. Sun needs a management shakeup from McNealy on down. My PowerBook is MY computer, not my flipping cell phone.
This is pathetic. I am a content developer/producer, as well as a developer and an independent author. No fucking way I'm going to put all my private shit on some remote server and live life over a thin client, regardless of bandwidth.
I'll have my own INTRANET and when I want to surf the Web I surf the Web.
I use a phone to talk to people. Believe it or not, that is what most people do. The fad of games and Palm on a phone will run its course, just like the demise of Palm.
It's a fucking phone. Keep it Simple Stupid.
What slays me the most is the notion that the "majority of future development will be services" is such a load of shit. If your day is so fucking hectic you not only tolerate but become engrossed by a Phone to transact your personal services you have some serious issues.
Go get laid, sit back, sip some coffee, tea or whatever and then admire your 30in Flat Panel, burning a DVD while you surf the Net, and then write a letter to someone who is more than just a 10 digit name with a 2 in screen.
from TFA:
The threat to PCs is twofold. Not only are services moving to the network, Schwartz said, but PCs won't be the way people use those services--particularly in poorer areas of the world that have risen higher up Sun's corporate priority list. Instead, that access will come through mobile phones.
But I must be missing something here, how will they make this feasible for costs that lie within reach of the people living there? If I would surf the internet on my mobile here in Europe, I am able to get a 30 MB flatrate(!) at max, for about 50 euro per month, with additional costs per 128 kB in the range of 10 cent or something. Why are they expecting this to work in underdeveloped countries if it doesn't even work here??? Maybe they expect that there are so little big objects (flats) and people using it out there that they can use just one GPRS sender per town or something.
What he probably means is that people there have only a need for low-bandwith communication, simple text processor, mail, web etc. But that is true for most of the people here as well. I cannot share Sun's obsession with thin clients in people's homes, I once had to work on a pc that was downgraded to a thin client to connect via adsl with a server in another part of town, and this was way too slow, the problem is that everything on your screen have to be send over the adsl-line every time, no caching or anything. Please, thin clients can work very nicely in very fast networks, but as long as we still have dsl at home, let us just buy pcs that process locally.
The rest of what he says makes a point, the static applications for 90% of the users are more or less developed completely by now (who needs the new functions of office 12 above the ones in office 97?), there is a shift towards webbased applications, and probably most people will need not more than a low-power pc with a usb stick to save their data, I know I wouldn't mind owning nothing more than a mac mini ;)
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
PCs will be relics when the internet will have the same bandwidth and be as responsive as a locally based system. And seeings God's roadmap on speed of light's increase, we're not nearly there for responsivity.
SUN Microsystems can make the claim again when I can play a decent FPS on some of their hardware.
That is a seriously impressive bit of work. As a demo of what modern browsers can do, I think it's probably the best I've seen.
;)
However, as a word processor, it's rather lacking. I couldn't figure out how to do a mail merge, or how to print envelopes, or even how to set the paper size. I could only partly figure out how to control tables; the interface for adding and removing cells is nice and intuitive, but I'm blowed if I can work out how to merge them or resize individual rows and columns.
For all I know, all those features are there, but it's damn hard to discover features when the only way to do so is to mouse over 300 tiny identical icons waiting for tooltips to appear. Surely if they can implement all that functionality, a few menus wouldn't be out of the question?
Oh, and insert the obligatory "it doesn't work in Opera" whine here.
For a company that was trading at around USD60.00 per share five years ago - and now under USD4.00 per share - many stock boffins would argue that Sun is an IT&T relic in its own right (refer stock history graph).
OzDJ
Moblog
> The average user of the future may not WANT to maintain his PC software environment in the face of constant security upgrades.
And of course, the user experience of 'constant security upgrades' will remain the same eternally, because Moses said so.
Jeez. Slashdot luddites. Start by checking out Firefox 1.5 and MSN Messenger 7.5, both of which use binary delta patches. Check out Vista, which can shut down subsystems to eliminate reboots in most cases (practically only _some_ device driver updates will cause reboots).
And honestly, for most users a 'Updates have been applied to your PC/Click here to restart' is not a big deal, certainly not a harrowing experience like some of the posters seem to suggest.
Go somewhere random
Nominating John Bolton to the UN is like Gates putting RMS on the board of directors for Microsoft. --TMP
;-) ... why should the UN or Microsoft be deprived of the opportunity of a fresh perspective
In both cases that can only be a good thing
If my memory doesn't fail me i think i've heard that statement from a "SUN president" every other year for the last 10 years
Jonathan Schwartz, president of server and software maker Sun Microsystems, said that the personal computer is increasingly becoming a relic. Instead, what has become important are Web services on the Internet and the majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their mobile phones."
Through their mobile phones? How big are these mobile phones going to be, because I don't know about Schwartzy-boy here, but I really don't like reading my web content on a screen an inch or so across - I cant have the text the size I like and fit a reasonable amount of information on the screen at one time, it just doesn't work - I don't like having to scroll so much just to read a 160-character text message, God only knows what I'd have to do to read, say, this article through a mobile - I'd wear out whatever button passes for 'Down' on my mobile about halfway through.
As for web services becoming important, isn't this what networking and networked-computing based companies have been screaming about since the birth of the internet? It's never worked because people don't like the idea of entrusting important data to some anonymous server somewhere on the internet - I'm quite happy to leave email from my friends on GMail, as it's really no bother to me if Google suddenly goes under, I just won't be able to go on a nostalgia trip of reading conversations I had about that movie we watched two years ago while drunk out of our minds. That doesn't bother me. However, I would have an issue with entrusting Google (or any other online service, but Google seems most likely to trial a service like Mr. Schwartz is suggesting) with my financial accounts, legal documents and research papers - it's an entirely seperate situation, and it's the failure of people like Schwartz to see this - or the fact they seem to be blindly ignoring it - that means companies keep throwing millions of dollars at 'Networked Computing' and 'PC as a Portal' systems and always coming out on the other side a few million dollars lighter and absolutely no wiser.
People do not want this from their computers, they want it to act as something where they can store the data in their own home - think of it like a digital filing cabinet you can lock up and secure in the corner of your living room; a filing cabinet that you own, where you own what's on it, and you are personally responsible for it's safety rather than entrusting it to some corporate entity's maybe-temperamental servers. That's a function of the PC that 'Web Services' will never replace, and one of the main reasons thin-client systems, of any sort, will never take off outside the business world - doing work for my employer, all my work is for the company and thus I save it to the central server and after that it's their responsibility to look after it - if they trash their network that's their problem, not mine, and I've lost absolutely nothing. At home, I want to look after my own data, as if I put it all somewhere on the internet, I've lost absolutely everything..
his isn't just a geek thing, my mother pretty much has the same approach - it was her who coined the 'digital filing cabinet' paradigm to me. People just arent willing to extend that level of trust with important documents. The other issues - bandwidth, etc - have mostly been dealt with, but this one will always remain, as there is no solution that I can see that would appease people of this mindset - and there are a lot of them, there will always be a huge market for a 'digital filing cabinet' - that would still include moving them over to thin-clients of in any way making the PC a 'relic'.
I think Mr. Schwartz is just nervously, perhaps desperately, flinging out press releases in a bid to convince someone - anyone - to buy up SunRays and other networked-computing Sun equipment before they go belly-up. It's a shame, as I love Sun, I love their equipment, it was always closer to raw UNIX for me than Linux, and it felt good somehow to be using the OS that ran the biggest of th
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
... what can easily be attributed to tecnical incompetence or budgetary constrains.
My company has all its important administrative applications online, web based.
A couple of days ago I filled my weekly timesheet at a time that most of my 10000 colleagues in the same region most likely were doing so as well. Not a single glitch.
Maybe your company does not have the expertise or budget to provide for centralized solutions, but the thechnology is here now an is perfectly usable.
You guys in the US are spoiled with one resource: space.
You can afford cheap housing because
a) You have lots of space.
b) You don't care about the environment (the dispendious cars you drive can be qualified only as obscene), thus driving a couple hndred of kilometers every day to your work is not beyond the realms of possibility (in other places that would be completely out of the question).
in many other parts of the world appartments is the best you can ever hope for, and in many instances they can be far more luxurious than the average house elsewhere.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The Sun guy says the future will be no more desktop computers, only powerful servers. Microsoft says everyone will have a powerful desktop running windows. Obviously, the truth is somewhere in between. Server apps are very useful and becoming more and more powerful. And no one is really writing desktop apps anymore...(well okay, there's still Photoshop, Office, Mozilla, Quicken, and Turbotax.) But desktop computers offer local control of your data and that's just too important to cast off for many of us. So,..I preduct the 10-year-out future will have more powerful servers and server-run apps (and many more of them) but those servers will still be accessed by desktop computers that will have themselves become much more powerful. Perhaps in the future, your power and freedom will even be defined by the power and capability of the local machine running under your control.
Every time somebody from Sun speaks and the predictable hateful diatribes follow, I wonder what Sun has done to the /. crowd to deserve such harsh treatment.
Here is a company that has been working with the community since times immemorial (do you still use all those sunsites out there I imagine, where many Linux distributions were originally hosted), that released several pieces of useful software for the community to improve and hack, that gave us the only viable alternative to MS Office, and when people like Dvorak (?Sp) and even UNIX magazines were preparing for the total dominance of Windows NT in the server room, Sun dodgedely stuck to its guns and saw, correctly, that UNIX (and here allow me to include Linux, may SCO be damned) had architectural advantages that made it the natural tool for a networked world (when BIll Gates did not even know the Internet had to be reckoned with and you had to install 3rd party products on Winodws to provide a TCP/IP stack).
They also gave us Java. I don't know you guys, but I have programmed many nice little applications with Java and have not paid a penny to anybody.
You add up all that and would think that Sun deserves a bit of respect on this site. They have gone as far as a company like theirs can go and then some.
I am not saying that Swchartz is brilliant, or that he is correct (he has some interesting points to make which of course hang from an agenda, but heck, tell me a company that does not have an agenda for bunnies sakes?).
The point I want to make is that a fellow techie company that has been good sport with the IT community in general deserves a bit more respect and understanding in a time when they don't look like the knight in a shinny armour they once were.
You can say whatever you want from Sun, but if they go down or are bought, their failure would be a honourable one, they tried to be innovate (the derided network computer, Java, software emulation like WABI, etc) and have been more open than most (there were clones of Sparc machines out there, pause for thought for the Apple fan boys I hope).
For gonnies sakes, go and download Solaris ant try it, it is free for you to keep and do pretty much whatever you want with it, it blows Linux (my desktop at the moment, so no snide remarks there please) out of the window in most respects (dtrace, zones, clean disk management). And you can check a lot of the source code as well.
Guys, that deserves respect, when somebody that has earned my respect speaks I may politely point out the problems with his argument or may keep polite silence, but will never insult him or deride him.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I think he means Sun Desktop computers are dead... We had those in our university lab. They have the weirdest setup, all the keys are in unsual places they have some form of keypad on the right hand side...
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
If desktop APPLICATIONS are 15 minutes ago then companies like MS that rely on the desktop will toss more applications into the desktop. This is really the root of things like Vista that will attempt to remake the PC over as your TV, gaming, home networking, DRM platform of choice. MS and it's pilot fish will attempt to replace your DVD player, TiVO, iPod, PDA and will attempt to insert themselves between your cell phone and cell phone carrier.
The term "web services" is definitely misapplied in common usage... but since it's a well-established term, it's probably a good idea not to use it to mean something completely different, as this article does, and expect people to understand what you're talking about. "Web services" means that software will be communicating with other software by well-defined RPC interfaces (generally described with a WSDL document) tunneled through the HTTP protocol. It does not mean eBay and Hotmail!
There are quite a few problems with the remote-PC option. For one, latency is a killer...
How true. With a 1.5 Mb/s DSL connection I find it takes longer for most servers to respond than it does to load webpages (even for relatively heavy pages with lots of images). Adservers can also be a major bottleneck.
You get the best of both worlds; ability to install your own apps and no need to physically maintain a machine.
The system administration could be drastically simplified for the common case, and security issues could be patched by an automated updater, similar to Debian apt-get.
The problem is that ISP's don't want this model; they want to lock people into keeping their data in proprietary systems.
I do not know which person said this, but someone once uttered, regarding the demise of mainframes, "You cannot replace a bull with 10,000 chickens."
To some extent, I do see the PC going the way of the buffalo. Citrix and other thin-client models are becoming more popular, especially as a way to more easily manage security. The rise of Linux as a business operating system is allowing more centralization too. The workstation (not just PC) is becoming expendible.
Click here or here.
Remember the Net PC ? Where is that today ? NOWHERE.
Java, an invention from a genius who worked for Sun ?
No, a copy of a concept implemented on the Apple II in Pascal back in the early eighties and ripped off and passed as innovation
to have something to talk about in marketing propaganda and STILL be losing to Microsoft all the way.
So, please, Mr CEO of Yet-Another-Candidate-For-Bankruptcy,
(hint : think Novell) STFU and stop pumping lame tired spin on yesterday's
fantasy.
No matter what you do, what comes down a wire is always going to be slower than what is loaded from a HD locally.
Ummm... no(TM).
Too bad for Sun that most of them are not written in Java and don't run on Sun hardware.
I believe that an IBM exec (Thomas Watson Senior, Chairman of IBM, in 1943) said something to the effect of, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
The IBM/Sun-style thinking has been going on for more than a half century, for longer than we've had transistors. It was wrong yesterday, it's wrong today, it will be wrong tomorrow. As you said, people like to own things, not rent them.
I play a few online games, and I'm still miffed that they don't have a standalone or LAN option. There's no guarentee that the service you subscribe to today will be here tomorrow.
I see PCs being used in three different modes, 1) allowing the user to consume content, 2) allowing a writer to create content and 3) allowing a developer to create and maintain the infrastructure that serves up the content.
.. but isn't it funny this comes up just as a decent PC is becoming affordable? It seems that for year the 'ideal' computer cost about $4k. Now you can get a dynamite setup for about $1k, and the price continues to fall on LCDs. I was stunned when I was able to buy a terrific 17 inch Samsung monitor (SyncMaster 750s) for $150 about a year ago -- that kind of hardware used to go for at least $400-600.
Certainly for 1), the PC may be becoming a relic
But are you going to get a writer (2) or a developer (3) punching out paragraphs or debugging code on a cell phone? Or an XBox (insert humourous diatribe on using $yourFavouriteEditor using the XBox gaming control here)? Or a Blackberry?
It just doesn't make semse.
ps: Schwartz's reference to Craiglist is nice -- note that this is a site that uses a very basic low tech approach and is very popular, and extremely effective. Nothing fancy -- it just works.
I'd like to see a web service based system compete with my Athlon XP 1800 when it comes to recording and playing back digital audio tracks (44.1 Khz) and MIDI. My oh my would it have to have HUGE bandwidth and near 0 latency cabling.
What a small minded, short sighted, "consumer oriented" twit.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
People have been saying that for years. When I can run vi and g++ on-line faster than I can on my own PC, I'll believe them. Until then, they are morons.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
For every problem, Linux has the solution. Have you taken a look at the Mock Mainfame HOWTO? Sounds like what you are looking for.
While I haven't seen the full text of the speech, I think the article makes the assumption that a PC is a desktop machine running windows.
If we change the definition of PC slightly, I think Sun has a point.
If pretty much the same "PC" hardware is running Unix, we call it a workstation, if it is running some custom OS and is hooked up to a game controller, we call it a game console. So does the hardware really add to the identity of the "PC"?
I think Sun probably means that the local OS/applications could easily be replaced by network-hosted services. (note I didn't say server-hosted...)
Remember Sun's "the network is the computer"? They were dreaming then, but now we are all waking up from the Wintel paradigm into the Google/Verizon one.
Would it be too hard for Google to add some spreadsheet and document editing functionality to Gmail?
Would a simple OS that allows a user to run something similar to gmail not be a whole lot easier to manage than windows/linux?
Current server-based systems like Citrix don't really provide a significant benefit because they have to deal with the tremendous bandwidth/compute overheads of traditional OSs and applications.
Adding the significant costs of these software dinosaurs into the equation leads to a pretty rosy picture for a Google/Verizon/AMD machine that could be used anywhere, anytime...
As for Sun? Grasping at straws, as usual...
PC users say Suns are relics. Go figure.
I, for one, welcome our old relic overlords!
First of all, I note that story did not actually quote the word "relic" or "obsolete" to Schwartz's speech. Maybe he did use the term, or maybe that was just the reporter's take on it...
But along those lines, what makes something a relic? Just wondering...
Is the VCR a relic?
Are telephone landlines a relic?
Paper is obsolete (paperless office anyone?) but we still seem to keep using it. Paper fills a required niche and no technology had yet appeared to displace it.
PCs fill a similar niche. If they had been invented *after* what amounts to a remote-terminal-to-a-central-computer, no one would be surprised (and yes, I do know they were; Schwartz is describing the dumb-term/x-term du jour).
Anything from Schwartz is intended to increase sun's sales, and should be treated as such. Sun's hardware is too expensive, and they are late (maybe too late) to the open source game. Factor Apple's switch into this and see Sun worry about an ever-bigger Intel.
Silly me, here I thought Sun's problems were all McNeeley. Little did I know another big problems is Schwartz. Wonder if he offered to eat his hat if he is wrong, like Vint Cerf did years ago when he said the Internet was going to fail - as if he would know.
Sorry, but this is just a shameless plug for Sun's business model. They sell servers. Go figure that they want a server-based world. They hate Microsoft. Go figure that they want the end of Microsoft's PC-based world.
Don't get too excited about the content of this statement. It's just another shameless promotional advertisement from a company losing ground to Dell.