By William Fellows
Sun Microsystems Inc’s second go-round at JavaStations which it recently said it would be introducing in the fall is being touted as a sub-$500 zero-admin cost network business appliance by Forbes. It’s code-named Corona says the heavily detailed piece. Our sources confirm that Sun had to delay a planned launch of Corona this month because it didn’t have enough top tier customers. It doesn’t appear to have many now although Forbes was told by Sun it aims to sell a million in 2000.
There’s little indication of what’s different from the first generation JavaOS-based JavaStation except that it will use a micro-Java chip and come with a new version of the X-Windows- derived interface software. It’s seen as a corporate play, not a consumer device; it pulls applications and data from network servers and can be hot-plugged into an Ethernet network. It has a smart card reader and a Java card with logon on and access privileges. IP addresses are reportedly assigned on the fly by Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) software.
Sun will have to come up with some fairly impressive arguments for Corona after the industry’s first stab at network computers was sunk by the rise of cheap PCs. We wonder whether Sun will be able to gather the likes of IDC and Aberdeen Group behind it, two of the research companies which it rounded up to declare JavaStations – or at least NCs in general – would be the next big thing in corporate desktop computing. Sun will no doubt be touting Corona as an architecture for thin client computing, which it still firmly believes will replace ‘hairball’ PCs in corporations. We’re told I-800-Flowers, Sun’s poster child for the original JavaStation which was announced more than two years ago doesn’t talk to the company any longer. á
