THE market for cheap, no-frills terminals designed purely to connect to the Internet will never take off, according to a new report. Industry analysts at Forrester Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts, say that the stripped-down terminals, called Network Computers, are doomed to fail.
Larry Ellison, the founder of software giant Oracle, mooted the idea of NCs last year. He envisaged machines that would cost under $500much less than the high-powered PCs people now buy. They would have no hard disc on which to store data, but they would provide the computing power needed to connect to the Internet.
"The personal computer is a ridiculous device," says Ellison. "It is much too complicated. IBM's introduction of the PC was the biggest marketing mistake in the history of the Earth." Ellison recently unveiled a prototype NC in the Netherlands, and promised that products made under licence from Oracle would cost no more than ...
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