Gates pours scorn on Ellison's NC

Bill Gates indulged in another dig at Larry Ellison regarding the latter's attempt to push the network computer (NC) as a viable successor to the PC.

Reported as describing the clash with Ellsion as "fun while it lasted", he told visitors to the IDC conference in Paris yesterday that after the founder of the NC predicted NCs would eventually replace the PC, his only option was to defend himself.

Rob Hailstone, research director at Bloor Research, said that Gates was "right and wrong" in what he was saying. He explained that although NC devices have had a small uptake, "more people are showing interest in Windows terminals and even turning to thin network clients".

He said: "people seem to forget that one can emulate the other," adding that "the hardware is the least important part of the architecture".

Hailstone said that Oracle believes the NC architecture is going to be renamed to avoid the confusion between the two. "Oracle will be building more applications on three-tier architecture. The hardware doesn't matter".

Gates went on to criticise Oracle's other baby, Java; saying that it wanted to rewrite every software application in a single language. He described this as "pretty mythical".