Oracle's Java plans sound familiar — and so will the response

I'm glad Oracle, Sun Microsystems' new owner, is so enthusiastic about Java. The language and its tools may be open source these days, but the project still needs a strong sponsoring company to lead it and provide development resources.

However, if Larry Ellison's talk of putting Java everywhere, and having Java-based computers to replace PCs rings bells, it's because he's been saying very similar sounding things for over ten years. The Network Computer was Oracle's 90s project to unseat Microsoft from desktop dominance. It was going to be simpler, cheaper and more secure than a PC. Needless to say the plan didn't work, since no-one could run their applications on it. There have been a few abortive attempts to revive the idea in the past decade, but we've all ended up largely using standard PCs, even if they're not running Windows.

Things are a little different now. Java is far more established as an application platform. We have a multitude of rich internet applications, as they're called, and people are used to doing work in the browser, rather than just reading documents. Maybe now the time is right for the network computer?

The answer is yes and no, but not in a way that Oracle will like. Slimmer operating systems that trade functionality for ease of use will be more popular, but I don't think they'll be run on brand new hardware: Instead we'll end up reusing older hardware to do the same job. Installing Linux and other open source operating systems is far, far easier than it was ten years ago, and hardware support is on a par with proprietary operating systems. Hardware you've already paid for is cheaper than any new hardware, no matter how compact and inexpensive.

So sorry, Larry, but you're still not going to be able to sell us lots of Oracle- (or Sun) branded network computers. The only consolation is that we might still see the end of Microsoft's dominance of the business desktop.