6 ms·

This is gold >> My nightmare scenario is that the Web grows into a rich application platform in an operating system-neutral way, and then a company like Siemen

by kylek 7y ago

This is gold >> My nightmare scenario is that the Web grows into a rich application platform in an operating system-neutral way, and then a company like Siemens or Matsushita comes out with a $500 “WebMachine” that attaches to a TV. This WebMachine will let the customer do all the cool Internet stuff, plus manage home finances (all the storage is at the server side), and play games. When faced with the choice between a $500 box (RISC CPU, 4-8Mb RAM, no hard disk, …) and a $2KPentium/P6 Windows machine, the 2/3rds of homes that don’t have a PC may find the $500 machine pretty attractive!

jacobush 7y ago
Very prescient iPad / smart phone prediction there.
- pvg 7y ago
  It's a sensible prediction for a product developed and launched within a year of this memo being written and acquired by Microsoft within two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV
  - jacobush 7y ago
    I'm thinking on a higher level - what we have is exactly that the data is on servers and that people do not have control over their own hardware. And that the cheap hardware is good enough.
    - pvg 7y ago
      I'm not following how that's different from WebTV. The memo predicts a product like WebTV and that product materializes almost instantly. In the enterprise space, 'thin client' was already every second word out of Larry Ellison's mouth.
      - majormajor 7y ago
        > When faced with the choice between a $500 box (RISC CPU, 4-8Mb RAM, no hard disk, …) and a $2KPentium/P6 Windows machine, the 2/3rds of homes that don’t have a PC may find the $500 machine pretty attractive! WebTV wasn't the compelling product the author was concerned about. The open internet and more open hardware won then (to MS's benefit, for the author). But the modern phone is that more compelling alternative.
        pvg 7y ago
        There are a lot of things that turned out to be more compelling than WebTV but predicting WebTV doesn't make the author 'prescient' about them either. The claim was about the prescience not the compellingness.
        majormajor 7y ago
        The prescient bit to me was "the web could displace windows if it becomes full featured and there's a compelling alternative form factor to the PC." Tons of people predicted webTv-like systems, but predicting MS losing power was much less common.
        notahacker 7y ago
        tbf loads of people predicted MS would lose power in the nineties. They just thought it would be due to desktop Linux
        pvg 7y ago
        Ok but the comment I was responding it did not say that. As to the MS thing, I'm not sure that's all that accurate either. It's certainly striking that someone wrote this and presented it at a high level within Microsoft when they did. But it also isn't that far from the way the future of the web was framed outside of Microsoft. If anything, it's a reminder of the outsized role Microsoft used to play just in 'mindshare'. A great deal of discussion about the internet and the web revolved around how it might affect Microsoft, how it might be an opening for (or not) for Microsoft competitors and how Microsoft would respond. I don't think either Google or Apple today loom quite as large in people's perceptions.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      What the original author was worried about was a world where it was no longer the case that 99% of consumers had to pay OEM license fees to Microsoft to do these things. And by and large that came to pass - the web is a free platform.
- giantrobot 7y ago
  Web appliances are a far cry from tablets and smartphones. Those are both basically the exact opposite of a web appliance. They're network connected and can store data remotely but they have significant client side power. They also have significant local storage, at least compared to web appliances. The old web appliance concept was an extremely low powered device with no local storage. It had just enough power and storage to run a browser. The concept is more like a Chromebook/Chrometop than a tablet or smartphone. The web appliance concept was predicated on some early to mid 90s assumptions about technology trends: 1. Storage was expensive so just burn everything into a ROM. Saving data wouldn't be a thing as you'd bookmark sites or post data to websites. 2. The Pentium (and associated support chips) was expensive and would stay expensive. 3. The web would basically consist of static images and text. Input would be done with POSTs from form controls. 4. The web wouldn't adopt any vendor specific technologies and plug-ins won't exist. With these predicates some low powered RISC SoC running a browser would have been a decent appliance. WebTV and the Audrey weren't terrible products, they weren't great but also not terrible.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Yes, but still not seeing the forest for all the trees. Yes, a phone has substantial computing power - compared to old technology. But is has nothing in storage or processing power against the data centers of Netflix, Facebook and Google. It's very thin in relative terms. Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. Granted, they use them but for inconsequential things like eye candy. Voice recognition and "your" social graph etc is on the remote server. It's almost like there is a law that nothing of importance must be computed on the local device.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      > Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. This is needed in order to save battery life. But Netflix/FB/Google do not have "substantial" processing power per user. They're providing a centralized service to a very large userbase, and that comes with a requirement to economize on both compute and storage.
outside1234 7y ago
Also a good prediction for the crash in PC prices and the emergence of "webbooks"
mellow2020 7y ago
And this is a quote from Howard Rheingold: > You have to remember that in democratic societies citizens talking with each other is very important. We've lost a lot of that with the mass media. Now we have an opportunity for citizens to create their own communications with each other. So when these big deals with the big companies and the big governments carve up this new territory, I feel it's very important that we keep a kind of "social green belt", that we keep the ability for citizens to talk amongst each other. -- "The Computer Chronicles - The Internet (1993)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s
wmf 7y ago
A lot of thin clients came out in the 1990s and they were garbage. Web browsers are ridiculously inefficient (10x or more cycles to draw similar UI), yet thin clients had something like 1/10th the performance and 1/4th the RAM so the net performance would be 20x-100x worse than a PC for 1/4th the price. WebTV was kind of an exception to this; it was very fast due to the split browser architecture and putting very little content on the screen. IMO their amazing engineering was wasted on the low end of the market. VNC/Sun Ray was a much better idea, but only within a LAN.
- kyuudou 7y ago
  What became TippingPoint put out an Internet Appliance similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener
nomel 7y ago
Could this be what MS has in mind for the Xbox Series X?
- remir 7y ago
  Also the WebTV/MSN TV before it: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MSN_TV https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MSN_TV

by kylek 7y ago

jacobush 7y ago

Very prescient iPad / smart phone prediction there.

pvg 7y ago
It's a sensible prediction for a product developed and launched within a year of this memo being written and acquired by Microsoft within two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV
- jacobush 7y ago
  I'm thinking on a higher level - what we have is exactly that the data is on servers and that people do not have control over their own hardware. And that the cheap hardware is good enough.
  - pvg 7y ago
    I'm not following how that's different from WebTV. The memo predicts a product like WebTV and that product materializes almost instantly. In the enterprise space, 'thin client' was already every second word out of Larry Ellison's mouth.
    - majormajor 7y ago
      > When faced with the choice between a $500 box (RISC CPU, 4-8Mb RAM, no hard disk, …) and a $2KPentium/P6 Windows machine, the 2/3rds of homes that don’t have a PC may find the $500 machine pretty attractive! WebTV wasn't the compelling product the author was concerned about. The open internet and more open hardware won then (to MS's benefit, for the author). But the modern phone is that more compelling alternative.
      - pvg 7y ago
        There are a lot of things that turned out to be more compelling than WebTV but predicting WebTV doesn't make the author 'prescient' about them either. The claim was about the prescience not the compellingness.
        majormajor 7y ago
        The prescient bit to me was "the web could displace windows if it becomes full featured and there's a compelling alternative form factor to the PC." Tons of people predicted webTv-like systems, but predicting MS losing power was much less common.
        notahacker 7y ago
        tbf loads of people predicted MS would lose power in the nineties. They just thought it would be due to desktop Linux
        pvg 7y ago
        Ok but the comment I was responding it did not say that. As to the MS thing, I'm not sure that's all that accurate either. It's certainly striking that someone wrote this and presented it at a high level within Microsoft when they did. But it also isn't that far from the way the future of the web was framed outside of Microsoft. If anything, it's a reminder of the outsized role Microsoft used to play just in 'mindshare'. A great deal of discussion about the internet and the web revolved around how it might affect Microsoft, how it might be an opening for (or not) for Microsoft competitors and how Microsoft would respond. I don't think either Google or Apple today loom quite as large in people's perceptions.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    What the original author was worried about was a world where it was no longer the case that 99% of consumers had to pay OEM license fees to Microsoft to do these things. And by and large that came to pass - the web is a free platform.
giantrobot 7y ago
Web appliances are a far cry from tablets and smartphones. Those are both basically the exact opposite of a web appliance. They're network connected and can store data remotely but they have significant client side power. They also have significant local storage, at least compared to web appliances. The old web appliance concept was an extremely low powered device with no local storage. It had just enough power and storage to run a browser. The concept is more like a Chromebook/Chrometop than a tablet or smartphone. The web appliance concept was predicated on some early to mid 90s assumptions about technology trends: 1. Storage was expensive so just burn everything into a ROM. Saving data wouldn't be a thing as you'd bookmark sites or post data to websites. 2. The Pentium (and associated support chips) was expensive and would stay expensive. 3. The web would basically consist of static images and text. Input would be done with POSTs from form controls. 4. The web wouldn't adopt any vendor specific technologies and plug-ins won't exist. With these predicates some low powered RISC SoC running a browser would have been a decent appliance. WebTV and the Audrey weren't terrible products, they weren't great but also not terrible.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Yes, but still not seeing the forest for all the trees. Yes, a phone has substantial computing power - compared to old technology. But is has nothing in storage or processing power against the data centers of Netflix, Facebook and Google. It's very thin in relative terms. Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. Granted, they use them but for inconsequential things like eye candy. Voice recognition and "your" social graph etc is on the remote server. It's almost like there is a law that nothing of importance must be computed on the local device.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. This is needed in order to save battery life. But Netflix/FB/Google do not have "substantial" processing power per user. They're providing a centralized service to a very large userbase, and that comes with a requirement to economize on both compute and storage.

outside1234 7y ago

Also a good prediction for the crash in PC prices and the emergence of "webbooks"

mellow2020 7y ago

And this is a quote from Howard Rheingold: > You have to remember that in democratic societies citizens talking with each other is very important. We've lost a lot of that with the mass media. Now we have an opportunity for citizens to create their own communications with each other. So when these big deals with the big companies and the big governments carve up this new territory, I feel it's very important that we keep a kind of "social green belt", that we keep the ability for citizens to talk amongst each other. -- "The Computer Chronicles - The Internet (1993)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s

wmf 7y ago

A lot of thin clients came out in the 1990s and they were garbage. Web browsers are ridiculously inefficient (10x or more cycles to draw similar UI), yet thin clients had something like 1/10th the performance and 1/4th the RAM so the net performance would be 20x-100x worse than a PC for 1/4th the price. WebTV was kind of an exception to this; it was very fast due to the split browser architecture and putting very little content on the screen. IMO their amazing engineering was wasted on the low end of the market. VNC/Sun Ray was a much better idea, but only within a LAN.

kyuudou 7y ago
What became TippingPoint put out an Internet Appliance similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener

nomel 7y ago

Could this be what MS has in mind for the Xbox Series X?

remir 7y ago
Also the WebTV/MSN TV before it: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MSN_TV https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MSN_TV