Sounds as if Funai Electric Co, one of the few network computer manufacturers that claim to have sold any devices built to the Oracle Network Computer Inc design, is giving up on the whole NCI effort as bad idea. Whether it has actually shipped any devices at all is a matter of conjecture. We couldn’t get any of its people at last week’s JavaOne show to admit to more than it hoped it would be able to ship its StrongARM-based device running JavaOS and HotJava Views within a month. When asked if we could buy one of the $500 devices running any other kind of system software, it said it would begin to take orders for the device next month, and said that if it managed to secure an agreement with Sun Microsystems Inc, JavaOS would be running on them. The HotJava Views interface was just a technology demo. Funai reportedly feels that NCI’s focus is now more on the Navio- oriented WebTV-style consumer side than on the corporate side at which its NC is aimed.
