Computer Vs. Net Device: More Vs. Less
The PC market might be down, but it’s in much better shape than the Internet appliance business.
Sony last month pulled the plug on the eVilla appliance it unveiled with great fanfare in January. This followed similar moves by 3Com, which axed the Audrey, and Netpliance, which dropped its iOpener.
Gateway hasn’t made an official announcement but reportedly is “rethinking” its plans to introduce an Internet appliance dedicated to the AOL service. Compaq continues to offer the iPaq MSN Appliance for $299, or $399 with a flat-screen monitor. The price is right, but the device is frustratingly slow.
That Internet appliances have never caught on isn’t surprising. What they offer in ease of use and low cost they lack in versatility and expandability. There might someday be a device that gives PCs serious competition, but consumers and businesses continue to buy far more PCs than other devices.
Internet appliance advocates are correct when they point out that PCs have a higher than necessary “total cost of ownership” because of reliability issues and the cost of support. That’s because the PC’s strength is also its weakness. The box on your desk isn’t just a personal computer. It’s a personal stereo system, a personal video system, a personal number cruncher, a personal word processor and so on. Maybe “PC” should stand for “personal chameleon” or “particularly complicated.”
PC hardware and operating systems have to support millions of possible combinations of peripherals, software and drivers. What’s more, any device that boots from a hard disk runs the risk of corruption.
I’ve had PCs stop working simply because I plugged a device into the Universal Serial Bus port that the computer couldn’t recognize or because a printer driver interfered with an application. Sometimes, the problem is easy to spot and fix. Sometimes, it’s virtually impossible to correct.
A couple of weeks ago, I spent several hours on the phone with a senior technician at Microsoft trying to resolve some issues with a corrupted registry on a reader’s Windows 95 system. Even reinstalling Windows didn’t help.
At the end of the day, the only solution we could come up with was to delete all of the Windows files and perform a “clean install” of Windows, which also required the user to reinstall all of his software. It’s like having to rebuild the engine on a car just because of a failed sparkplug.
You’d never have a problem like this with a network appliance. Then again, you wouldn’t be able to get that appliance to do something it wasn’t designed to do.
Try plugging a digital camera into a network computer. Don’t even think about using a network computer to create a music CD or print labels or generate greeting cards. Most appliances won’t let you download plug-ins to enhance the very thing Net appliances are designed to do--browse the Web.
BICBox of Newbury Park (https://www.bicbox.com) has an interesting compromise between a PC and a network appliance. It gives users the reliability of a system that can’t be messed up by the user along with some of the flexibility of a PC. The $299 BICBox doesn’t come with a monitor or a hard drive, but it does come with Linux; for an additional $99, you can use Windows 98 Second Edition.
It includes a word processor, spreadsheet and other office programs along with a browser and e-mail software. The operating system and all the software come on a single CD-ROM. Swapping out the CD-ROM allows the customer to switch operating systems or upgrade the software, according to BICBox Chief Executive Mike Salort.
Eliminating the hard drive also eliminates the possibility of the system failing because of user error, a virus or a software glitch. The device has a USB connector, which can accommodate an optional hard drive. I tested a machine equipped with Windows 98; though booting from the CD makes the system a bit slower than a PC, it nonetheless performed as advertised.
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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard between 2 and 3 p.m. weekdays on the KNX-AM (1070) Technology Hour.
