Related Web Works

Yet another PC manufacturing hopeful has announced plans to produce a $500 Network Computer (NC), this time using farm workers for the labor. Backers boast that with its 100MHz 486 clone, this general purpose box is a better PC than many of us have sitting on our desks. As usual with these NCs, the monitor and operating system aren't included. What those of us who have been involved in the industry know, is that the price is nothing special. Using current, quantity 1, middle of the road mail order pricing, we get a $480 PC that has a lot more to offer than any $500 NC I've seen yet.

Case and Power Supply $40 1.44 Floppy Drove $25 Motherboard and100 MHz CPU $100 SIDE Adapter $15 4 MB RAM $40 14.4K Internal Modem $40 SVGA adapter $40 Keyboard and Mouse $20 540 MB Hard Drive $160 Total $480

Add $270 for a decent monitor and DOS/Windows, and you've got a $700 PC that's been obsolete for about two years, but still beats at least half the PCs currently in use. The reason not many companies sell the in the U.S.A, is even with some profit, nobody wants to support a PC customer for a sub $1000 purchase.

The funniest part of the NC craze is how a speech by the Oracle Chairman was blindly adopted as an industry goal. The desire to reach this goal isn't based on market research or any track record, but on a wishful thinking conjecture of the anti-Microsoft crowd. The conjecture ran something like this;

"Who wouldn't buy an almost complete WWW capable box for $500?"

I wouldn't.

Morris Rosenthal

Assistant Editor.

|Newsletter | ITA Database | Business Technology Reports | World Wide Survey |

Webmaster