12-18-96 - DATA GENERAL PUSHES FOR FASTER PROGRESS ON THIN CLIENTS

December 18, 1996

DATA GENERAL PUSHES FOR FASTER PROGRESS ON THIN CLIENTS

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.