A look at the IT industry in Japan and abroad

Reports on My Stand-alone PC's Death are Premature

by John Boyd

The age of the stand-alone personal computer is over." So declared IBM CEO Lou Gerstner, at a recent press conference in Tokyo, while promoting the joys of networking.

Now, if Gerstner was merely adding a dose of drama to spice up his sales spiel, his grandiloquence will soon be forgotten. But he hardly appears to be the hyperbolic type. What's more, two IBM Asia-Pacific executives I spoke with later, by and large, shared Gerstner's sentiment that, as a personal productivity tool, my poor PC is about to join the dinosaurs. The new era will be one of a universally connected world.

The age of the intranet

It's not hard to see why IBM might be getting a little carried away here. The Internet boom is turning out to be a cash cow for Big Blue and other vendors of World Wide Web hardware. Even more lucrative is the task of helping businesses adapt the Internet for use as their internal corporate network: the so-called "intranet." Netscape reports that 80% of its revenues now come from intranet business -- which suggests corporations must be buying tons of hardware.

IBM has also spent a fortune -- $3.5 billion, lest you forget --on acquiring Lotus Development for its famous Lotus Notes, the best known of the new collaborative software applications. It was Gerstner who decided Lotus Notes was worth that staggering sum, though industry luminaries like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison have argued that the intranet is making Notes redundant.

Gerstner simply cannot afford to have customers drag their feet, wondering if Ellison might be correct, for with each passing month Ellison's view gains in credibility. Gerstner has to sell the corporate world on Lotus Notes today -- while it still clearly leads in features -- in order for it to become a universal business tool tomorrow. This is the only way he will ever recoup IBM's investment, let alone turn a profit on the software. Hyping the importance of a network-centric world today, while conveniently neglecting to mention the frailty of the underlying technologies, helps create demand for Notes.

Evolution, not revolution

Of course, to some extent, Gerstner is right. It's now unthinkable to buy a computer without a modem. Even new game machines, like the Apple Pippin-based Atmark from Japanese toymaker Bandai, come with a built-in modem so game players can surf the Web.

But, while Gerstner speaks about the death of a computing era, I would suggest that what we are seeing is merely a growth spurt in the computer's evolution. The age of the stand-alone PC is no more over than is the age of the mainframe. Merely adding a modem to a PC doesn't transform it into a network-centric terminal. If that were the case, then the end of the stand-alone era began a decade ago, when the 300-baud acoustic coupler gave way to the 1200-baud modem.

I'm into my third generation of modems, yet I still use mine only sparingly, given the high cost of telecommunications in Japan -- not to mention the arcanery, lack of security, slow transfer speed, incompatibility, and unreliability that continue to plague computer communications. It's simply too much of a stretch to argue (as one IBM executive did) that such a limited amount of connectedness means my PC is no longer a stand-alone machine. What is it, then, when my modem is turned off -- which is during most of my working day?

To be worthy of the name "networked computer," a PC ought to be cabled into a LAN, or at least plugged into a network via a modem during business hours, as a rapidly growing number are in the corporate environment. But there are also many of us who work outside a networked environment, or who tap into a network only briefly. And the number of non-corporate users is growing, not shrinking. While the home market may be peaking in the US, it's only just taking off in Japan and other Asian countries. In fact, IBM's own Aptiva PC is one brand that has done particularly well in feeding Japan's recent home computer boom!

For SOHO (small-office/home-office) users, the stand-alone PC -- with its limited connectivity -- is the practical order of the day. Few of us now need, or are willing to pay for, workstation connectedness. Preach that the stand-alone computer is dead, and you risk shoving millions of customers into the arms of competitors like Compaq, Gateway 2000, Fujitsu, and NEC, who don't share the same narrow thinking.

Compaq, which is no slouch when it comes to server sales, says loud and clear that it wants to be number one, not only in network computing, but also in the home and SOHO markets. In Compaq's own words, it wants to become a computer vendor by 2000 -- and that, by definition, includes stand-alone PCs.

In addition to writing for Computing Japan, John Boyd is the Tokyo correspondent for InformationWeek and writes the weekly "Computer Corner" column in the Japan Times, but he is otherwise available for hire if the fee is fat. He detests e-mail, though, so you can bug him at 6840615@mcimail.com, but don't expect an electronic reply!