(So far) The whole network computer issue misses the point. The point is upgradable software. What's one of the biggest issues facing the large IS organization? How to roll out bug fixes, product updates, new drivers and other new pieces of software. Often, that requires reaching out and physically touching every one of those boxes.

The industry has tried to solve this problem many times. Norton Administrator for Networks and Microsoft's own SMS are just two of the many quasi-useful solutions. Hey, I even built a fix in 1987 that fed software from an HP 3000 to 386-based Vectras.

Feeding software onto a networked computer has never been hard. Our problems come from the PC version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (which states that the act of observing something introduces new elements that alter what is observed) wrapped up inside the second law of thermodynamics. PC configurations tend toward their most random state, while at the same time, the act of changing a PC configuration means you could end up destroying life as we (or your user) knows it.

Case in point: Last weekend, I simply wanted to add a new hard drive and upgrade a program in one of my home computers. That simple task turned into a weekend of components failing, registries corrupting, long file names getting lost and DLLs going missing.

Enter Java and the virtual machine. Now, there's certainly something to be said for a completely isolated and stable "sandbox" where each application executes. But the real power here is that the application can be downloaded every time it is used or just downloaded again whenever the application changes. And since the app runs in a sandbox, you never have to worry about hardware status, missing DLLs and other vagaries of life in the Windows world.

Sounds great, doesn't it? It would mean software that's always checking to see if it's current and then automatically upgrading itself as needed. Takes the distribution nightmares away, that's for sure.

But (as a reader pointed out in criticism of last week's bloatware column), we don't use applications in a vacuum (or in a sandbox). "They aren't just individual toys that power employees to dash off a letter or create a killer presentation. These things are part of business processes within the company. For those needs, the ability to create special applications, integrate with group business processes, utilize database applications and combine word processing, presentations and financial data is essential. These large-scale uses need powerful, highly flexible software to provide for business requirements," the reader said.

But when you use multiple applications in a single sandbox, you end up with interaction issues. What happens when you upgrade one of four apps that work great together? You risk instability. So you're back to testing, retesting and maybe even touching every machine again.

So you think you have problems now? The assumption that every computer is hooked up to a network changes how our desktops operate--and the network computer/NetPC are simply the first clumsy attempts to build tomorrow's desktop. But you'd better deal with this problem soon, because self-modifying software is next on the menu. And just how are you going to support software that rewrites itself in response to how it is used?

Jim Louderback is the editorial director of PC Week. He can be reached at jim_louderback@zd.com.