The Network is the Computer 2

In an earlier post I extolled my beliefs from 1997 that the Network Computer would be big. Of course it flopped and the PC carried on as the main business tool of choice but one of the revelations from Steve Jobs biography is that the iMac that Apple launched in 1998 upon Steve Jobs return to the company was originally intended to be a Network Computer. It's not surprising that given the closeness between Larry Ellison, the NC's father, and Steve Jobs and their shared ambition to take a chunk out of Microsoft that they will have discussed such things and shared ideas.

Of course the price of PC's plummeted and undercut the savings of the NC. So whilst I may have been wrong in my beliefs at least I was wrong in good company - namely Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.

What no disk?

At the tail end of my time working for the big O Larry introduced the Network Computer. From memory it was the talk of the town at Oracle Openworld 1997. I remember being in a client briefing with a senior Oracle Marketing VP telling the client that in two years time they would have replaced their PC's with NC's.

I have to say that I bought into the concept of the NC and so did Sun and IBM (with their respective Javastation and Netstation). I'd recently finished a site visit for a large telco who had basically locked down their SOE PC build so that the PC barely used the local C: drive anyway. The logical extension of this was to produce a computer that would boot directly from the network and store eveything on network drives.

Funnily enough it wasn't any theoretical limitations that did for the NC but more than when it was released the price of PC's dropped from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars undermining any potential cost savings that Network Computers may have introduced. Shame really becuase I still think the idea had legs.