RESEARCH FIRM POINTS OUT THE DARK SIDE OF NETWORK COMPUTING

Zona Research Inc in Redwood City, Calif. believes the recent announcement by Oracle Corp. of Redwood City, Calif. is illogical for the user. The Network Computer Reference Profile “is an interesting announcement because it is based primarily on vendor needs, not user needs,” the research firm declares.
Zona says the vendor’s need is to create a vision of the world without Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash. The researcher concedes that network computers will be manufactured. However, the company does not believe they will displace PCs as the preferred user platform in the enterprise.

The most glaring omission from the network computer profile is the lack of Windows application support. “All of our research shows that for enterprises, being able to run Windows applications is as important as being able to display HTML information and far more important than supporting Java applications,” says Greg Blatnik, Zona Research Vice President. “This would probably limit the device to environments in which the primary task is to access networked information where no Windows applications are needed.”

“ The standards and specifications of the NC Reference Profile are already available on PCs,” Zona contends. However, the profile is simply a statement of the obvious—Internet capable devices need to support HTML, IP, TCP/IP, and SNMP. However, instead of supporting Windows applications, the Profile supports Java applications.

In effect, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. is attempting to substitute its products, Java Application Environment, for Microsoft’s as the underlying software of the desktop-user client. Thus, the user ends up paying Sun a fee for software use instead of paying Microsoft for Windows.

This is the crux of the problem with the initiative. No longer is the effort simply an attempt to create a base level definition of the protocols needed to deliver Internet information to the user. Rather it has become a major thrust in the battle to change the dynamics of the desktop-user client equation.

The Java Application Environment is a Java Class Library and the Java Virtual Machine Support. “If full scale applications are created using the Java language, they are likely to become very large, requiring large amounts of physical memory or a large virtual machine,” says Blatnik.

“ Without persistent storage, these large applications would then execute page swapping across the network. This has the potential of creating significant network traffic. If you add persistent storage, then administration costs will increase, making the cost difference between a PC and a network computer immaterial.”

Oracle’s interests also lie in creating an environment in which Microsoft’s presence and influence is minimized. By promoting network based computing, Oracle hopes to increase demand for its database technology, which resides on the network. A major risk Oracle chances by aggressively promoting access based computing that does not use Windows is negatively impacting their current Windows client-server technology based business.

Netscape sees this initiative as a way to strengthen their claim as the user environment of network computing. They indicated that the best description of the NC Reference Profile was ‘Netscape Navigator with device drivers. ’

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