Larry Ellison didn't invent this, terminals and "thin computing" have been around for a long time, it's just that browsers are now the best way to interface rich interfaces.

The origins of VNC are an AT&T project where people would wear RFC tags, walk up to any workstation and have their session. This was long before Ellison was talking about Network Computers. There is also John Gage from Sun's motto, "the network is the computer."

I don't think it's given that he's right or wrong. Apple has chosen a very different path (powerful devices with local apps) and they're also extremely successful.

The real lesson, I think, is that most people don't want to _manage_ devices. They don't want to deal with backups, they don't want to manage disks, filesystems and drivers, and if you can take all of that away they'll be happy to store all their documents in your cloud.

For home and personal devices, Apple's approach is fine. But for business and education, central management is essential.

>But for business and education, central management is essential.

For business, it depends.

I think my company is fairly typical in that we offer fully managed systems but don't require that people go that route. (But you're more or less on your own for support if you choose to self-manage.)