Forecasters See Portability as the Next Big Step for the Internet

On a brightly lit stage, Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison paced in front of a normal-looking soda vending machine, with a mobile telephone in his hand, waiting with an audience of several thousand people for a can of Coca-Cola to drop.

What was unusual about Ellison’s demonstration was that the soda machine was controlled over the Internet by a computer in Sweden that Ellison had just commanded using a tiny Web browser in his mobile phone. After a brief pause, the Coke came spilling out of the machine to the cheers of the audience gathered in Los Angeles last week for the OpenWorld convention for Oracle database users.

Ellison’s soda machine was a tiny demonstration of what he and others, such as Sun Microsystems’ Chief Executive Scott McNealy, have heralded as the age of Internet computing--the third age of computing following the eras of the mainframe computer and the personal computer.

Their vision is of a world where the power of the computer is removed from the desktop and scattered among countless little electronic devices that become powerful because they can connect to the Internet and so can also tap into powerful information and service systems that are based on large, remote high-powered machines.

Ellison said the next era will be ruled by mobile phones, hand-held computers, pagers, electronic watches and other simple Internet computer-like terminals that will work like little ubiquitous windows on the broader world of data.

Instead of buying powerful desktop computers with ever more complex software, the world of Internet computing would bring simple, focused software that could simply be taken off the Internet and rented when needed.

Personal computers would not have to be upgraded all the time since most of the heavy work could be done by centralized computers. “The Internet changes everything,” Ellison said. “The only thing that remains to be understood is how and when.”

For the 20,000 Oracle users who came to Los Angeles last week, the idea of Internet computing is a more familiar vision than for those who attended the other large computer convention, Comdex, which took place at the same time in Las Vegas.

Comdex, attended by more than 200,000, is the ultimate convention of the personal computer--a place dominated by Microsoft’s Windows-compatible software and Intel-powered personal computers.

By contrast, OpenWorld is ruled by companies that make the high-end computers used by corporations to serve up Internet Web pages or store their huge databases of information, such as sales and inventory. Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Intel were the big names at OpenWorld.

Most of these companies were at both conventions, and all of them have rapidly refocused themselves on the Internet over the last five years.

But for Sun and Oracle, whose focus on large corporate networks put them outside the great desktop computer boom that fueled Microsoft’s rise to power, the Internet movement has been a huge boost and a vindication of their vision that a computer network is the key. The Internet is, after all, just one big network of networks.

Ellison and McNealy were also relishing their first big opportunity to mock Microsoft after the finding by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson on Nov. 5 that Microsoft is a monopoly and has used its power to stifle competition.

But besides the Microsoft antitrust trial, McNealy and Ellison were buoyed because after years of evangelizing their vision of ubiquitous Internet devices, networked software for the masses, omnipresent connections to the Internet and open standards, they are all beginning to edge into reality.

Mark Jarvis, Oracle’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, said that the necessary standards and devices to spread the Internet into every corner of computing are beginning to appear.

Jarvis said that key standards such as wireless access protocol and extensible markup language (XML) are beginning to find applications in the real world.

The protocol enables mobile telephones to connect to the Internet. XML is a next-generation method of laying out Web pages to make it easier to display pages on different devices, from mobile telephone to desktop computers.

Jarvis said the mobile phone and hand-held computers are the first devices that will spread the gospel of Internet computing to the public.

But eventually, he said, people will begin to change their views of the desktop computer, looking for simpler, cheaper machines that derive their software and computing power from distant central computers, known as servers.

Sun showed off its Sunray terminal at OpenWorld--a $499 computing device that has no processor. Oracle debuted a $199 terminal at OpenWorld called the NC Version 2 that it is using as part of a charitable program to equip schools with low-cost computers.

Microsoft also demonstrated its version of an Internet appliance with a $199 machine it showed off at Comdex.

For corporations with high-speed connections, the Internet computing movement has already begun. Services that maintain data and programs for companies, and serve them over the Internet when needed, have quickly sprouted. These so-called application service providers relieve companies of the hassle and expense of maintaining their own data centers.

For consumers, Internet computing and the demise of store-bought software is still a long way off because of slow Internet connections into the home.

But Jarvis said the speed issue will eventually disappear as more people get high-speed connections through phone lines, cable or satellite.