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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
what is he selling now: consider the source.
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.
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 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.
"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?
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...
It is
good
enough
4 me
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
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
My personal banking info
My vacation pics
My resignation letter
My will
All these, and more, I do not necessarily want on some other guys server. My banking info? Here, and at the bank. Not with some 3rd party. My vacation pics? All of them? Well...some, I want to keep local. My will? Here, and at the lawyers office. Again, not a copy on some other guys hard drive. Some guy I have zero control over.
A LOT of things could be used and kept online. But an awful lot of other things I want to keep very, very local.
Why store data on a PC or a LAN at all?
There are a couple of compelling reasons. One is privacy. While it is possible that my personal data will be compromised through a security hole on my Internet-connected PC, it is much more likely that it will be compromised if I leave it on a network server out there where any would-be spammer or identity thief can bribe underpaid sysadmins to give them a copy. Certainly, no company is going to want its trade secrets and financials exposed in that way.
The other major reason is cost. No one is going to host several hundred gigs of data for me for free. And while I realize that most folks don't have that much data -- ignoring for the moment gigantic collections of pirated movies and MP3s -- even small amounts of data storage will come at a cost, whether that's a subscription fee that adds up to much more than the cost of a hard drive over its lifetime, or just having ads shoved in one's face whenever you want to use it.
There's one other important reason to host your own data: when network data storage is commoditized, the service providers will be operating on razor-thin margins and therefore prone to bankruptcies and mergers. What happens to your data when your hosting service goes belly up? What happens to your data and your privacy terms when your hosting service is acquired by a larger company with less scruples?
Why even buy music or movies? Pay-per-play!
Because my daddy doesn't pay for my rock and roll lifestyle anymore.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
...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.
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.
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