Sun president: PCs are so yesterday | The Coffeehouse

Programous

"So asserted Jonathan Schwartz, president of server and software maker Sun Microsystems. Instead, what has become important are Web services on the Internet and the mobile phones most will use to access them, he argued at a Friday speech here at a meeting of the American India Foundation.

"The majority of the applications that will drive the next wave of innovation will be services, not applications that run on the desktop. The real innovation is occurring in the network and the network services," Schwartz said. "
URL: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5879292.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed

Wow, that from the head of a company that’s only real business is selling server products and servers. I can’t possibly think of any reason why he would say that. Immersive desktop experiences are so last year.
</sarcasm>

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

Jonathan Schwartz wrote:
PCs are so yesterday

Sun... Sun... aren't those the guys who said that PCs are on their way out and thin NCs (Network Computers) are going to replace them, since all people did with their computer was access the 'net? This was, oh, 8-10 years ago.

I think there's room for all sorts of models. Some people take the bus. Some have their own cars. Some will use their top-of-the-line home PC, some will access services through their free-with-a-tank-of-gas mobile phone.

Network services ARE getting more and more prevalent, more and more important (Good read: Dare Obasanjo's blog), but not everything you do on a computer is internet/data based.

JChung2006

Mobile phones and handheld "palm" PC's are essentially the network computers (NCs) Sun was talking about ten years ago. The PCs we are familiar with today are eventually going to seem as quaint as IBM PCs and Apple IIs seem to us today.

I disagree about real innovation limiting itself to the network and network services though. There is plenty of opportunity to innovate with input, output, and form factors. PC configurations that seem like science fiction today will be commonplace someday.

An example of what I'm talking about:

http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/dermaldisplay.htm

That's not an actual product. Innovation starts with imagination.

Mike Dimmick

If mobile computers are going to replace PCs, explain to me why I just replaced my monitor with a larger one.

I work in mobile computing. The amount of information - however well presented - you can present on a 3" - 4" display is necessarily limited. Sometimes you just need to see more than that. Higher resolution screens (more dots in the same area) don't help much - to remain readable you need to increase the size of the text or graphics.

Just using this interface is pretty much impossible from a Pocket PC. I certainly wouldn't be able to code on one. Traditionally the biggest monitors have been bought by people doing CAD or desktop publishing, where you need to see both the detail of an area and an overview of the whole design.

So, will we instead all use notebooks or tablets? I don't know. Notebooks are necessarily compromised compared to their desktop counterparts - the desktop can use much more electrical power because it doesn't need to run from batteries. 'Desktop replacement' notebooks tend to have really poor battery life - you can use it to replace your desktop only if you're prepared to tie it to your desk!

However I think the time for flagrant waste of power (and hence energy) is nearly up. Perhaps that will force greater use of notebooks - or perhaps lower-power processors will become more commonplace and we'll simply have lower-power desktops. Probably the latter, since the size constraints of a notebook still mean that the same specification part is more costly at the notebook size rather than the space available in the PC chassis.

A 24" notebook would also be extremely unwieldy!

As for the networked computer, users are pretty clear. They do want rich experiences on the desktop. To get those rich experiences, local computing power is required. The actual cost of the computation is dwarfed by the cost of the presentation.

Sabot
My name is Dave Oliver. I'm a Technical Architect.

Heard it before ... remember the NPC from Oracle will replace the PC?

The PC isn't the same as it was them ... the PC will continued to evolve thats why it's still with us now.

The PC will move with the times, when it stops then it will die.

Andre Da Costa
Created with PhotoDraw 2000 V2

Of course a PC would be so yesterday, if you buy a PC in the future its eventually going to be something you buy in the past when day passes.

jrcrum

Sun has always seemed to have almost the right idea.

Services will be big, everyone knows that. How does he go from that to "PCs are so yesterday, everyone will be using cellphones instead"? Services aren't worth much without a decent user interface. And as much as I like mobile stuff, the little screens are just barely usable for most things, and not a lot of fun. Sure they will improve; some are already sporting 640x480 screens, but they are still tiny, and to be readable, the font sizes must be so big that you can't really show a "normal" 640x480 on them.

The user experience is what counts, not the technology or service that provides the experience. I think replacing PCs with cellphones will happen around the same time TVs are replaced with cellphones. Approximately never.

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

I have no doubt that one day my cell phone (or watch) will have more power then my laptop and will have many GB of storage and have proximity detection so that I can walk up to any display device and see the screen on a big display or in my HUD display glasses, etc.

However, what ever you call it, or how small it gets, or what OS it runs, it is still a PC - Personal Computer. Something still needs to process and display all that goodness on the client side and interact with me and consume all those web services. I would hope he is embarrassed after reading that in print.

ddewbofh
And so the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

We actually have a lot of nice integration with cellphones already. I have a bluetooth equipped nokia running symbian. I come home and my computer (hooked up to my stereo) automatically starts playing my top 25 favourite songs. I just keep the phone in my pocket and every call and so on is made through the computer. It keeps logs on phone-calls made, I can use the phone to control itunes, I can send sms from the computer and so on. We're moving at a steady pace towards a totally connected society. Only time I ever see my phone, when I'm at home, is when I put it on charging. I imagine I could do something similar if I had a bluetooth equipped laptop, like keeping it synced with all my personal data, like emails, phonebooks and so on. These are very exciting times indeed. EDIT: Formatting is totally screwed up when posting from Safari, you'll have to go bug the KHTML team or Apple about it. Smiley

Wil
Wil

MS is apparently starting to come along to Sun's opinion that PCs are so yesterday, which is why in the new re-org XBox and especially MSN are seen as viable alternative platforms to Windows in the post-Allchin era, perhaps even on an equal footing with Windows itself (which never would have been allowed under Allchin's watch). So maybe now we won't have to endure patch after patch to IE, because now it is OK to consider the browser as a legitimate stand-alone platform rather than just one more widget within the XP set, and so the browser can get the full-fledged overhaul it needs. Hailstorm may have crashed and burned, but MS still wants to own the Internet, and the PC will be only one gateway among many to the Net, as people start accessing it more and more from mobile platforms rather than just from their desktops, and as they concentrate less on client-hosted apps and more on Net-hsoted ones.

Tonatiúh
Cuali itcha a cosamalot

Andre Da Costa wrote:
Of course a PC would be so yesterday, if you buy a PC in the future its eventually going to be something you buy in the past when day passes.

Con el vacio mañana
tus pies tropezaron
y ayer se deshizo
en bruma, en nada...
tu hoy que ser quiso

Fragment from "Constancia",
a poem of my own writen on 1973.

Tonatiúh

qkc321

Come on people! Be serious! Computers are computers! Who cares about the connectivity model? Citrix, Terminal Services, Web, the old WAP gateways, telnet, the 3270 protocol, the "newer 5250", Thin Clients, and Fat Clients are all the same thing, a Client-Server connection, each with its own technological challenges.

The user experience is richer, and the connection speed faster, but the underlying technology is the same, the same instruction set that run the 8088, can be run in the Pentium computers, and Sun is not different, in their backwards compatibility.

A real shift in paradign will not come from wearable computers (faster, thinner, better), but from de creation of a different type of logic that computers can implement and use to calculate. A tri-state logic (such as yes, no, and maybe?). Other shits may be related with understanding of the mind, and its simulation and modeling in a computer environment.

Not even augmenting the brain capacity with additional memory (like that movie with K. Reeves), or direct neural interfaces is a change in paradigm. It is just technology evolution.

AdityaG
OMG VISTA FTW LOLZ!!1one

qkc321 wrote:

Come on people! Be serious! Computers are computers! Who cares about the connectivity model? Citrix, Terminal Services, Web, the old WAP gateways, telnet, the 3270 protocol, the "newer 5250", Thin Clients, and Fat Clients are all the same thing, a Client-Server connection, each with its own technological challenges.

The user experience is richer, and the connection speed faster, but the underlying technology is the same, the same instruction set that run the 8088, can be run in the Pentium computers, and Sun is not different, in their backwards compatibility.

A real shift in paradign will not come from wearable computers (faster, thinner, better), but from de creation of a different type of logic that computers can implement and use to calculate. A tri-state logic (such as yes, no, and maybe?). Other shits may be related with understanding of the mind, and its simulation and modeling in a computer environment.

Not even augmenting the brain capacity with additional memory (like that movie with K. Reeves), or direct neural interfaces is a change in paradigm. It is just technology evolution.

What are you smoking? and can I have some.

Anyways, people will keep making these statements as long as they still want media to keep sucking at their balls so their little newspaper or journal can have a new story. Why don't we all just wait until someone actually does anything eh?

Cheers,
Aditya

littleguru
<3 Seattle

Didn't they come up with the "NC" a few years ago Wink

I haven't seen them for a long time. It's time to bring them up again Big Smile

Sun has such a long tradition of coming up with the wrong things. They should be happy that someone used their JAVA in web browsers: the aka "java applets". Without those applets in websites and the idea behind it they wouldn't even exist anymore. As far as I know it wasn't even SUNs idea to allow user to run applets in the browser.

BTW they bet that time also on the server market and mainframe computer...

yatinbhatt

In another 10 years, SUN will go off the map of software and face same fact as NOVELL.

HP/IBM will eat them. (I mean takeover)

RichardRudek
So what do you expect for nothin'... :P

Mike Dimmick wrote:
If mobile computers are going to replace PCs, explain to me why I just replaced my monitor with a larger one.

[snip]

... to remain readable you need to increase the size of the text or graphics.

[snip]

I agree.

However, I've learnt that it's best to avoid making definitive statements, unless your absolutely certain. Here's two examples of why...

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