Just a week after a huge publicity push for the NetPC standards that Microsoft advocates, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison fired back. Onstage at New York's Radio City Music Hall, he set up a network of network computers (NCs) that, he said, delivered on the network computing promise he first pitched last year. This low-cost approach to computing does away with all the shortcomings of PCs and NetPCs, Ellison claimed.

Those flaws, he said, include complexity, cost, and--perhaps worst of all--the fact that the center of gravity in the computing universe is Microsoft. According to Ellison, the NC will do nothing less than change the economics of computing and democratize information access. He promised that using an NC will be as simple as turning on the TV, answering the telephone, and switching on the light.

Exploding NCs? No Problem

With Gen. Colin Powell making an appearance to congratulate Ellison on donating $100 million to provide an NC to every school-kid in America, and with one computer even exploding on stage, it was certainly an interesting presentation. The explosion stunt was staged to demonstrate that even if your NC fails, your data remains safe on the server. You just connect a new $500 NC and pop in a smart card that stores your identification and you're good to go.

The transition from individuals running mini-mainframes on their desktops to network managers taking back control seems inevitable as the cost of owning a PC spins out of control, Ellison said. Both the NetPC and the NC address this issue, but in different ways. Microsoft's NetPC calls for diskless PCs that run applications off the network. Oracle's NC specification is a more radical departure from PCs, designed not only to reduce the cost of corporate computing but also to make computers as easy to use as televisions. "Network Computing delivers a computer architecture and network infrastructure that's similar to television and telephony," Ellison said.

One-Two Punch

With two announcements, Ellison delivered a one-two punch aimed squarely at Microsoft. The rollout today of the first NCs, from Oracle spin-off Network Computing Inc. (NCI), comes just a week after Compaq, Dell, Gateway 2000, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and others demonstrated their NetPCs at the PC Expo computer trade show.

NCI's Network-in-a-Box, to be available in mid-July for $4,995, includes:

* one Intel-based NC server appliance, including NC Server software;

* two Intel-based network computers from Accton or Funai;

* two NC smart cards from Schlumberger;

* and network hardware, including a four-port hub and all cabling.

Claiming that a fifth-grade teacher can set up the network in half an hour, Ellison did so onstage. "See if Bill Gates can do that with Windows NT and NetPCs," he quipped. According to information from Oracle, a five-user network costs $22,423 from Microsoft and $9,325 from Oracle.

And Oracle's launch today of its database program Oracle8 comes just a month after Microsoft's Scalability Day, when Microsoft CEO Bill Gates declared that Windows NT can handle even the most demanding corporate applications. Although Ellison derided Microsoft for turning the "proprietary" Windows into a de facto standard, he also said that "Oracle8 will be to network computing what Windows was to personal computing."

Responding to Gates' criticism that NCs aren't compatible with Windows (Gates says NC stands for not compatible), Ellison demonstrated Windows applications running on NCs via Oracle's emulation software. Ellison claimed that NCs are 100 percent compatible with Windows. He also went so far as to say that Microsoft, with WebTV and Windows CE, has announced more network computers than IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems combined. "Microsoft is a huge supporter of the idea of network computers, but they're all based on Microsoft standards."

NCs at Home, School, and Office

Oracle intends to outdo Microsoft not only in managing big corporate databases that handle terabytes of information, but also in providing tools for the classroom. Ellison announced today that he has given $100 million to fund the Oracle Promise--part of America's Promise, a project headed by Gen. Powell. Ellison pledged to put an NC on the desk of every school-kid in America and to connect the students to the Web at a cost of $500 to $600 per child.

Ellison is also positioning the NC as a family computer. Because of the PC's cost and complexity, he contends, 70 percent of American families don't have computers. In Europe and Japan, that figure goes up to 90 percent. The so-called "rate of adoption" in U.S. households is even dropping. Whereas 4 percent of homes without computers bought them last year, that figure has dropped to 2 percent this year. "Why?" Ellison asked. "Simply because PCs, marvels that they are, are too complex and unbelievably expensive. Network computing is a divinely simple idea," he said. "We're taking the complexity off the desktop and putting it back to the network, where it belongs."

Source: PC Magazine