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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
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
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
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.
That's a whole lot of relics being manufactured and sold!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
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.
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.
"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"
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.
www.sjbaker.org
You should have just bought a WebTV! I mean, who needs anything else?
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?).
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.
but that's not what the nice man from Sun is saying. He's saying that PC's are obsolete
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...
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
... 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
...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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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
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
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.
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.
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 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.