The Oracle
I can remember as far back as 1996 when Larry Ellison started to proselytise the “network computer” – a dumb terminal that provided an interface to processing power that was stored centrally. it was going to cost $500, which back then seemed a snip for access to that sort of processing power.
Here’s a quote from that article:
Oracle has already acknowledged that the initial price target was ambitious, so it is planning a family of devices, including a high-end machine and an entry-level network computer. The high-end model will reportedly have a keyboard, mouse, flat-panel monochrome or color screen, modem and connection for ATM or ISDN, video conferencing microphone and camera and 4 Mb each of dynamic RAM and flash RAM in a two-pound, laptop-sized box. It will employ a version of the ARM RISC processor from Apple’s Newton MessagePad, giving it the power of an early 486 machine.
Well, you’d expect a bit more than 4Mb of RAM and a monochrome screen for your $500 these days. But this isn’t meant to be an exercise in nostalgia. What Larry envisaged is coming true, a little bit more each day. The apps we can access online are getting increasingly powerful. And I don’t just mean the things that we couldn’t run on a home PC (eg Google’s index), but apps we’d traditionally run locally. Of course, it’s all in a bit more of a distributed / cloud-style network of the 21st Century, but still. Some notable examples are:
- Photoshop Express. The app that made me think of this whole note – and the single most impressive Flash browser based product port I’ve seen
- Google Apps – becoming more and more of an Office-competitor every day
- Apple TV – one day (soon) probably replacing most set-top boxes and linearly broadcast TV (quite a way to go with download speeds and HD though)
There’s a lot also happening in online desktops, but I’m less convinced of those in the short term.
Ironically, as all these apps become better and more powerful, so do the PCs we access them with. In fact, hardware is becoming so much of a commodity (viz Carphone Warehouse moving into the “free laptop” game) that there isn’t any need any more to go “dumb”. We can have both – powerful local processing for games and when we want to be standalone, and network-based apps for the always up-to-date versions, and access-from-anywhere-ability.
Going fully network-based is going to take a long while to happen, but with certain apps (TV, for instance – or where the business model means we get great apps for free online), it’ll happen very soon. Larry, the Oracle, probably feels vindicated.
