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."

Comments

Ignorant publicity grabbing statement?

[markass530]

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.

Re:a whole 1.544?

[sbaker]

    "1. What is Verizon FiOS Internet Service?
    Verizon FiOS Internet Service is a broadband service designed
    to provide Internet access with maximum connection speeds of up
    to 30 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream" ...that's not really 3.5Gbps is it? (and of course it uses that good old standby of snake oil salesmen everywhere "...up to..." - meaning that you might actually get a tenth of that some of the time).

If your game ran on a computer on the other end of that link, the
best full colour 76Hz resolution would be about 128x128 pixels without compression - or maybe 300x200 with compression.

Not terribly impressive for playing Doom3 eh? You could probably play Tetris over that quality of link...if you could stand the latency.

Re:I don't think so.

[ppanon]

Nope, he meant synchronous.

Re:Sort of...

[elmegil]

One suspects that what Zander is really offering

Um....Zander has been at Motorola for some years now. Jonathan Scwartz is the current President.

As for Sunray, I suspect that the day of a Sunray or something similar IN the home may not be terribly far away....if we can ever get a Sunray server that actually does all the things a winders PC does today. I know lots of people tout the Gimp, but I can't live without Photoshop. I haven't seen any open source equivalent to Quicken that I like as much, and can use as seamlessly. And then there's Half-Life 2 :-)

I do know people who work for Sun whose families only do web browsing and email, and they've actually set up Sunray servers successfully. But they're pretty rare in the general population...

Re:I don't think so.

[InvalidError]

Next year's CPUs will not be exactly free... and neither are this year or last year's CPUs for that matter.

Since Moore's law is about transistors, increasing cache sizes and going multicores still cause the transistor count per die to increase, though performance often scales much less than linearly and more drastically so with patchwork implementations like Pentium D.

There are simple physical reasons why cache sizes are doubling with every process upgrade even though they provide only 0-10% performance gains: L2 caches have low power density and the extra die space helps to keep power and bonding pad densities at manageable levels. In most modern CPUs, more than half the transistors go in the L2 caches... for Prescott 2M, the L2 accounts for ~80% of the transistors but only ~30% of the area and (probably) under 20% of the power.

Re:I don't think so.

[fm6]

I think Schwartz is talking about business computers. Which is what most PCs are used for. So games are a non-issue. But you're right about the rest of it.

I'm don't see why this pdonouncement rates a story — it's been the Sun party line for as long as I can remember. In fact, it's the reason Jonathan Schartz works for Sun. He used to be the CEO of a NextStep development company called LightHouse Design. Sun took them over and turned them into the Java Application Group, which was supposed to create a Java-based alternative for Microsoft Office that would run on a Network Computer. I hate to think how much money Sun spent on this effort, not just buying Lighthouse Design, but hiring lots more people (I was almost one of them) and buying other Java app development companies to fold into JAG. Then they suddenly realized that nobody wanted to buy Network Computers and shut the whole thing down.

You'd think they'd learn from an expensive mistake like this, but they've repeated it a couple times since, with so-called "thin clients" and other nonsense. Despite repeated failures, they keep pushing the idea. It's ironic that a guy who came to Sun through one of these boondoggles is now the COO, and thus in charge of repeating this nonsense.

No. You prove it.

[Flower]

When in doubt, go to the 10Q. Since I also saw this article and can't find any article saying that MS' Entertainment division has been consistantly profitable it dawned on me that, being publically traded, they would have to explain the loss.

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.