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IT TRENDS

Innovative initiatives: The four new PC initiatives point to the increasing centrality of the Internet in future computing solutions.

Gage is happily, still with Sun — as its Chief Researcher and resident guru — and 23 years after he made that statement, he now has the satisfaction of seeing that one network — the Internet — is indeed emerging as the epicentre of personal (and to a large extent, corporate) computing.

In the Sun vision, the network enabled what is known as distributed and on-demand computing. Customers have slightly adjusted this vision and forced the industry to deliver something that they like better and want more, while still in the spirit of the Sun ‘sutra.’ Consider this series of independent initiatives, all in recent weeks: Last week, over 600 Walmart outlets in the U.S. began selling a desktop PC below the hitherto unattainable price threshold of $ 200: It was the gPC made by a US-based, but Taiwan-owned budget PC maker, Everex. Powered by an energy-efficient (and hence ‘green’) processor from Via Technologies, the machine came with 512 MB of memory, an 80 GB hard drive and a Combo DVD player-CD writer. It ran on a variant of Ubuntu’s Linux known as gOS. You had to buy the monitor separately.

The media joked that the ‘g’ stood for Google rather than Green — with some justification: the default screen of gOS was heavily oriented towards Google’s online tools and services: YouTube; gMail, the photo tool Picasa, and the many office applications like word processor and presentation that Google provides as free online tools.

In other words, one could increasingly do away with heavy office applications on the desktop and depend wholly on their Internet versions — using the Net both as tool and storage. There was only one proviso — you had to be ‘connected’ to the Internet almost all the time. The second initiative comes from the California-based NComputing which is currently in India, aggressively promoting its vision of affordable computing. Its core mantra is this: There is a lot of excess and wasted power in the average desktop or notebook PC that most of us rarely use.

So why not expand the reach of one PC by using it to drive half a dozen other computing platforms?

NComputing’s Chief Marketing Officer, Raj Shah, is now in India and he explained to me that the company is offering two options: the XSeries is targeted at educational institutions and a standard PC of any make can be used to drive up to six of NComputing’s devices which look like mobile phones: Each of them can be connected to a monitor, mouse and keyboard — and this will create a network of 7 computing platforms which can work quite independently.

If the mother PC has an Internet connection all the PCs can surf the Net just as they can use all the applications loaded into the main machine. Each satellite unit consumes just one watt of power (they must be connected by cables less than 10 metres long) and the cost is around Rs 3,000 for each of the nComputing devices.

There is another option — the L Series for corporate and government applications, where the connection to the mother machine is via Ethernet. NComputing’s solution has been adopted widely in Macedonia where nearly 2 lakh computing stations across over 400 schools were created within six months. Last week NComputing joined hands with NIIT to reach out to class 1 to 12 students across India.

A slightly different ‘take’ on what makes a compelling and affordable access device has come from the Chennai-based Novatium. The Nova netPC is a small connection device that is fuelled by Linux, but contains no application software of its own. When a monitor, keyboard and mouse is added, it works like any PC — provided it is connected to an Internet service.

All the utilities are hosted by the Internet provider who will allot some space — around 2 GB — on a central server for every Nova user. This is a model that works on subscription — one buys the net PC — then signs up for a service from an Internet provider: MTNL has tied up with Novatium recently to offer the service in Delhi and Chennai where customers get the Nova netPC for an initial payment of Rs 1999 and the ability to surf the Net for an hour a day and also access productivity tools like Office for a monthly subscription of Rs 399. Both Nova netPC and the Everex gPC point at the new emerging computing paradigm where all the common PC tools and applications are accessed from the Net — and one’s archives stored there as well.

The NComputing model is also an example of new shared models of popular PC applications — although in this case the repository is on a PC, not on the Web.

The final straw in the new net-centric wind blowing, is the launch recently by the Taiwan-based Asus of the Eee PC, (the three Es stand for easy to learn, easy to work, easy to play) an ultra small laptop with a 7-inch LCD screen; fuelled by an Intel chip; 512 MB of memory — and no hard disk: the storage is all solid state in the form of a Flash drive.

Less than a kilogram in weight with a full notebook-style keyboard, the EeePC which costs from $ 300 to $ 400 depending on the size of the flash drive (2-4-8 GB) was intended as a kids’ machine but became unexpectedly popular with lay customers of all ages.

It sold at the rate of one unit every six seconds when it first went on sale at a Taiwanese shopping channel. The machine is due to be launched in India very soon at around Rs 20,000.

The early models of EeePC are fuelled by a Linux distribution and the opening menu provides Open Office, Mozilla browser, a Skype phone, a media player and links to Wikipedia.

Each in its own way, these four new PC initiatives point to the increasing centrality of the Internet in future computing solutions.

You were right, John Gage, when you said it in 1984 — the network is the computer. Not any network, but the mother of all networks — the Internet.

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