Ellison's Second Network Computing Company To Shut Down

Failures

from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept

Back in October of 1999, I was confused when Larry Ellison announced plans to launch a company called New Internet Computing (NIC) to sell “internet terminal” computers. Besides the fact that many other such attempts at selling people web terminals with no hard drive had failed miserably, Ellison had already started another company, similarly named Network Computing Inc (NCI) that morphed its way into Liberate. Lots of people then expressed surprise when Ellison named a journalist with no business experience to run the new company. Well, three and a half years later (and under new management), the company has admitted that they never got anywhere near their expected sales volume and are shutting down. While it’s easy to point out flaws in retrospect, many of these were pretty obvious at the time the company launched. Most people don’t want a device that limits their options – and many don’t feel comfortable knowing their data is “out there”. Also, without widespread always-on internet connections, it’s important for people to have local access to applications and data. The response to this was always that widespread always-on connectivity was just around the corner. However, if the people could predict that, they should also have been able to predict the fact that computer components were going to get increasingly cheaper, to the point where it would be possible to offer a fully functional computer (with a hard drive) for about the same price as this company wanted to sell machines without a hard drive.