The NC: Moving Beyon d The Cost Of Ownership By Brian Walsh   The network computer (NC) won't make it in corporate networks. At least not in the way you think it will. Don't get me wrong, the NC has wide applicability and relevance far beyond its immediate target--the Wintel desktop. Standards and portable applications have been my own personal hot button for years, and it's refreshing to see the market validate open systems to a greater or lesser degree. However, at issue here is the fact that most corporate shops and industry outlets look at the total cost of ownership as the be-all and end-all of the NC. True, user support, technical infrastructure and administration are less onerous in the NC scenario, but by how much? The NC may reduce these problems, but it will not eliminate them. I must ask: Have you ever known of any company that has gone out of business because of the cost of its PCs? Did you ever gain market share from your competition because you got a better deal on desktop support than they did? I didn't think so. Dutiful Cogs A very large percentage of your staff is dedicated to support, and I'm sure it's a huge issue. But unless you're giving that support away for free, how does saving money accomplish anything other than to make you a dutiful cog in the corporate wheels, filing away a small percentage of costs year in and year out? You can fool yourself into believing that saving 5 percent here and 10 percent there for desktop support will make your career, but most likely it will simply become a line item recorded in your review. Saving money in today's market is not like inventing the wheel. Quite simply, it's survival--and everyone's doing it. It entails precisely defining your target markets and users and the minimum service levels necessary to sustain them. Audit your network for satisf action and conformance. Squeeze the requisite efficiency from the budget primarily through competition, limiting th e labor involved by intelligent technology choices and outsourcing and streamlining procurement through economies of scale. Labor will remain the real cost, and will be driven as much by the applications you choose to develop and/or deploy, as it will by the operating system of the access device. Only then will you be able to commence your real effort. Off to Market Most organizations guard their "standard product" declarations with zeal. However, when these declarations are blindly defended, they become outdated, bypassed and irrelevant. Many shops are sizing up the NC to determine when or if this vendor standard will develop the critical mass of market share to give them the courage to jump in. The thinking goes, "Once we adopt the NC as a standard, our costs will diminish to next to nothing; all we have to do is wait and see what happens." Wrong. You will grow both old and poor waiting for vendors to standardize. Besides, the market has already forced vendors to standardize on as much as they're likely to. Remember, the "discovery" of the Internet was not so much an initiative of Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems or Netscape. Rather, it was the result of so much good work by so many good people; it was standardized layer by layer and finally enabled with HTTP and a browser. It's fairly doubtful that additional standardization will be the result of your favorite vendor's initiative. The mistake is waiting for the NC rather than recognizing and pursuing the market realities that created the NC. Reducing time to market for your organization's systems is the only significant contribution you can make to its competitive position.

The Networkologis t by Patricia Schnaidt FreeWire by Bill Frezza On The Wire by Bill Alderson and J. Scott Haugahl In The Middle by Bruce Robertson Updated February 21, 1997