How to Think About NCs

The avalanche of publicity about network computers, or NCs, has reached a peak, I hope, over the past couple of months. IBM, Sun, and other box builders have been rolling out--or at least previewing--their new "office information appliances".

Corel began showing previews of its NC-focused, Java-only WordPerfect Office suite. The "Damn Microsoft" claque in the second balcony, led by Larry Ellison at Oracle, yelled "Hooray!" at every announcement.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Intel surprised many with their own announcement of an NC-like hardware standard. But unlike other NCs, which will run on Java derivatives and thus make the operating system both platform-agnostic and nearly irrelevant, the "Wintel NC" (to coin a phrase) will run . . .Windows derivatives. Surprise, surprise.

Outside the business, pundits and publications have been weighing in with their considered (or at least considerable) opinions on how that bad ol' symbol of wanton waste and techno-excess, the PC, will soon be buried under a wave of tiny, cheap machines with blissfully limited functionality. No more will once-productive but now bone-idle employees waste time making PowerPoint presentations: Sun chairman Scott McNealy, one of the biggest NC cheerleaders, says the best overhead presentations are made by hand with a plastic sheet and felt-tip pen, in 5 minutes or less. (I'm not kidding. He really said that.)

There's been a lot of Newspeak uttered, too, on behalf of NCs. The most egregious example is Sun's advertising slogan for its new JavaStation: "What FREEDOM Looks Like!" NCs aren't about freedom at all, friends, but about control, and about reasserting the control that IS once held over its terminal-using "customers". Forbes magazine, which I otherwise admire greatly, capped the NC-over-PC hype in November with a cover story on the importance of "right-sizing your PCs." Which meant, Forbes decided, dumping them.

This myth that we were once strong, proud, industrious, hardworking folks who didn't waste time on silly PC games but have lately fallen victim to the allure of such things as italic type and cutesy clip art is an insulting one. But it is becoming pervasive, even though the idea that the very depth and richness of the tools offered by today's PCs and PC software keep us from real work, distract us, and turn us into time- wasters is largely nonsense. To assert that we'd all be a lot better off with vastly more limited tools--and believe me, NCs are much more limited devices--is to suggest that we possess neither judgment nor a sense of responsibility, that we'd really rather be down at the video arcade.

But there is another side to the pro-NC argument. It posits that the costs of choosing, purchasing, installing software on, and delivering PCs to workers' desks--plus the continuing costs of supporting the anarchic computing environment that results--are huge, out of control, and unnecessary. And just between us, there is some truth to that.

Indeed, NCs are in many ways appealing, appropriate, and even cool. I see many uses for them in business, and I'm convinced they're going to be a big success in some roles.

If you're still reading, take a deep breath. I know, putting up with the guff about NCs makes recognizing their real value difficult. I've spent almost 20 years walking the hallways and pounding the conference tables of Corporate America, arguing for the proliferation of PCs, for the one- person/one-CPU principle, for empowering workers by giving them access to tools that will genuinely help them do their jobs better. So I sucked air for a while, too, on NCs. It took me a while to recognize their worth and the merits of some of the arguments made in their favor.

The fact is, though you and I and many of the people with whom we work certainly need the power and flexibility of PCs, a lot of our coworkers don't. People who boot up 15MB word processors to write 15-word e-mails are not making rational use of a $3,500 computer.

To give the devil his due, when Scott McNealy says that to write all he needs is to backspace, delete, cut-and-paste, and print, he's about right: No one would accuse Scott of being much of a writer, nor for that matter a preparer of budgets, proposals, business plans, contracts, presentations, or any of the other work you rely on your PC to help produce. Scott's role at the top of Sun is to bang out short, pithy e- mails in response to work of the sort done and submitted to him for approval by other people--people who you may be sure don't use NCs or NC-like devices, but rather Sun workstations powerful enough to launch missiles. In a phrase I once thought headed for oblivion, he has people to do that for him.

In many companies I work with, half or fewer of the workers really need the power and flexibility of a true PC: They'd be well-served by an NC. They read and respond to e-mail messages, writing their own brief messages and replies live, in real time. They use the company's intranet to look up phone numbers, or check on HR benefits rules, or maybe file expense accounts. Nothing they do with that box on their desk demands a PC. So let's give them NCs.

Whatever you may think of the idea of NCs, I think it's clear that we're moving away from the homogeneous PCs-only desktop-computing environment and toward a much more heterogeneous computing environment. The wide adoption of notebook PCs was an early harbinger of that change, but we didn't understand that. So when the idea of the NC came along--a simple, basic, cheap device well-suited to many office workers' computing needs--we also failed to recognize the contributions it can make.

The world of NCs is good for you and me, as long as the IS managers in your company (and mine) don't go too far, taking away one of our costly- to-support PCs and replacing it with an NC. Again: You have to make that call on an employee-by-employee basis, not blanket it over a broad classes of workers. The world of NCs is good for IS people, too, for they will be able to restore some semblance of control and balance to their user communities.

The NC isn't good news for traditional PC hardware makers, which find little joy in the prospect of selling a $700 to $1,000 machine instead of a $2,500 to $3,500 box. It also isn't good news for software publishers, for in the new world of NCs, the list of applets in wide use is going to be a lot shorter than today's lists of PC productivity apps.

Resist the temptation to condemn reflexively both NCs and those who praise them. Sure, the loudest voices may have their own less-than- honorable agendas, but that doesn't mean the technology is fatally flawed. We won't succeed in integrating NCs into business or delivering that truly right-size chunk of computing power to each worker's desk by blindly condemning new ideas and products.

Source: Jim Seymour, PC Magazine