Sunday, August 10, 2008

Week 4 - Failed Prediction

The failed prediction that comes to mind comes from something that I actually experienced:
"Oracle Corp. CEO and Chairman Larry Ellison told a group of customers here that the first network computer conforming to the company's specifications will be launched in October(1996), and priced at $299. Ellison predicted that there will be 100 million NCs in use by the year 2000. "Virtually every major telco in the world is in conversations with us about ... buying the NC and giving it away like cellular telephones," Ellison said.


The 1996 customer demonstration utilized a keyboardless, diskless NC with 8 megabytes of RAM was demonstrated. The configuration used a Zenith television as a monitor, a mouse, and ran Oracle's interOffice groupware application. While they couldn't see using the NC in the short term, it piqued the interest for the long term. "Not right now, but somewhere down the road," said Philip Theiss, Vice President of Global Financial Process Development at Estee Lauder Companies in Melville, New York.

The NC brand (owned by Oracle) was mainly intended to denote a range of desktop computers from various suppliers that were supposed to be significantly cheaper and easier to manage than standard fat client PCs. As a result of declining PC prices and configurability of PCs, the NC brand never achieved the popularity predicted.


References:
"Inside the NC,"
http://www.byte.com/art/9611/sec11/art2.htm Accessed July 27, 2008.
"Oracle, IBM ready Network Computers,"
http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-09-1996/swol-09-nc.html Accessed July 27, 2008.
"Cheaper Computing, Part 1,"
http://www.byte.com/art/9704/sec6/art1.htm Accessed July 27, 2008.

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