By ROB O'NEILL
"There's something going on 'round here, and what it is ain't exactly clear ..."
The words of that old '60s protest song came to mind the other day as I was crunching some figures for an upcoming research report.
There has been quite a lot of anecdotal evidence around the
IT industry that thin client network computers, or NCs, are being installed at a rate of knots. I know of one IT consultant who claims to have spent most of last year installing NCs.
Now that may come as a bit of a surprise to many who wrote the technology off after Oracle boss Larry Ellison, high on testosterone as always, famously overpromised and underdelivered with the NC.
If you remember, Ellison was going to take over the world: "We're living at the dawn of the information age, not the dawn of the Microsoft age," he famously said in 1997. "The next generation of computing, network computing, will not be dominated by any one company or any one person."
It was a call to arms and many responded. Unfortunately, despite significant support, the Java language on which Ellison's NCs were to run was immature and its inventor, Sun Microsystems, sought to maintain a proprietary hold over it for far too long.
In the end, sensible heads begged Ellison to get back in his box and the brief NC/PC war died away.
But NCs and thin client computing are still with us. New Zealand appears to have warmed to the thin client/fat server model more than most other countries.
Two trends emerge: growth in corporate PC deployment will slow and the now-maligned NC will achieve the highest growth rate of any desktop device. The research is based on planned deployments one year and three years out.
Further, NCs appear to be depressing PC growth in a way not seen across the Tasman or in Southeast Asia. Frighteningly, the high adoption rate of NCs here could be interpreted as yet another indicator of New Zealand's failure to perform as a knowledge economy.
* Rob O'Neill is an analyst with management research company Strategic Research.
