As everyone's life becomes organized on the Internet, you will be more likely to gather your friends together in an electronic community than at a backyard barbecue. Electronic communities are no longer the exclusive domain of the socially challenged. Netscape's Communicator is an early glimpse into the future of the universal client. Netscape calls its product the universal desktop, but the company underestimates its own technology. Desktops are for computers.
Universal clients are, well, universal.
One of the challenges of a ubiquitous interface is allowing for variations in the underlying hardware of the client device. Configurable products, like Communicator, provide some level of comfort that a common subset of functionality will be available on the personal computer and wristwatch of the future. Users will be able to add any additional functionality that their hardware can handle. In providing a richly functional universal client, besides the challenge posed by variations in client-device hardware, the other major challenge is the client's tendency to put on weight. Network computers promise applications will reside on a server and only be downloaded to the client as required.