It’s not without reason that when Tom West, the longest serving Westborough, Massachusetts-based Data General Corp executive says something, people tend to listen. It’s not just the fact that he is credited with the development of the 16-bit and later 32-bit Eclipse minicomputers between 1974 and 1979, as well as a whole host of projects like the creation of the Clariion business unit since. It’s also the fact that his us-and-them style of project leadership – the ‘us’ being his development team and the ‘them’ being the company itself – has always attracted attention, including most notably the Pulitzer prize winning best-seller The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder. So when he says that Data General is not moving fast enough with regards to bringing out a thin client, there was bound to be a stir. While there has been speculation that Data General may well build a thin client of some description, there has bee n little movement to date, the company saying that it will wait for one of the plethora of thin client pretenders – Boundless Technologies Inc, Diba Inc, Sun Microsystems Inc and others – to come up with the goods. But it seems West is getting impatient: They’re over-complicating and over-intellectualizing the problem, he says. All you need is a browser and TCP/IP. We’re getting pissed off waiting for it to happen – and we’re going to have to move and do it ourselves. West’s is a view not shared across his company, as president and chief executive Ron Skates demonstrates: I think we have to wait and see what happens [from other thin client developers]. I know that Tom has a different attitude, and he and I have arguments about this. And it seems West is doing more than just arguing about it too: When you start talking about doing a thin client the analysts start panicking because they see it as a sink-hole. That’s why I’m doing it quietly. But he [Skates] knows I’m doing it. So how would West’s thin client look? The emphasis seems to be on ease of use. West describes it as a Henry Ford opportunity – saying that there is a huge market which would like to be able to use electronic mail and use the Internet without knowing what’s under the bonnet: he says that it should be as simple as using a television.
