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Farewell to the thin client
Traditional browsers now include so much new technology that their mission has changed. The question is: Changed to what?
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What was once a browser is now your business
In an information economy, software applications are the business. As the descendents of browsers become the standard mechanism for delivering software applications to the desktop, they will become the focus of your business. Browsers were about hyperlinked documents and cool graphics. Their replacements will be all about delivering software.Standard interfaces like IIOP and DCOM promise to deliver existing client/server and mainframe applications to the new Internet client. Similarly, database interfaces like JDBC and JSQL will enable developers to easily construct transactional applications for existing databases. Whether it's an MRP (Manufacturing Resource Planning) system or a payroll application, businesses will transact increasingly with the browser's replacement.
What was once a browser is now your window to the world
CNN promises you the world in thirty minutes. The replacement for your browser will deliver the world 24 hours a day to anything with a screen. In North America, network television has seen a dramatic decline in viewers. Cable networks and the proliferation of channels is only one of the causes. Accessing information from the Internet is having a dramatic impact on the broadcast and cable industry.The reason for this is simple. If you have been logged onto your standard home page on MSNBC or attached to a channel that is pushing live news feeds to your computer all day, what need do you have for an overpaid, human newsreader?
Television is still the preferred mechanism, though, for whiling away those ever-declining hours between work and sleep. While the broadcast media have high hopes for the new digital transmission protocol that will phase in over the next three years in North America, their avarice will remain unsatisfied when they realize digital television is just another word for specialized computer service. The much-promised convergence of television and computing is at hand, and the result looks suspiciously like a networked computer.
What was once a browser is now your only friend
It is said that your true friends are found in your address book, not in your neighborhood. As everyone's life becomes organized on the Internet, you will be more likely to gather your friends together in an electronic community than at a backyard barbecue.Electronic communities are no longer the exclusive domain of the socially challenged. The new Internet client will manage relationships as well as it manages business -- well, at least most relationships.
What was once a browser is now unavoidable
Four terms will define the browser's replacement: multimedia, ubiquitous, cross-platform, and agent-driven. Netscape's Communicator is an early glimpse into the future of the universal client. Netscape calls its product the universal desktop, but the company underestimates its own technology. Desktops are for computers. Universal clients are, well, universal.One of the challenges of a ubiquitous interface is allowing for variations in the underlying hardware of the client device. Configurable products, like Communicator, provide some level of comfort that a common subset of functionality will be available on the personal computer and wristwatch of the future. Users will be able to add any additional functionality that their hardware can handle.
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Resources
- Netscape has an excellent whitepaper ("The Networked Enterprise") that describes its vision of what computing will look like
for corporations over the next few years. It warrants a careful reading:
http://www.netscape.com/focus3/comprod/at_work/white_paper/vision/print.html
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