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20060123 Monday January 23, 2006

 Thin clients in the news again..

This isn't really my area, but I'm interested in it.

These two chaps...



Mark Hall and Frank Hayes set up a nice little debate (one side and the other) on 'thin client' and where it might be headed in 2006. Now, obviously, Sun has a vested interest in TC's as we produce the SunRay technology and you might expect us to be in favour of it...

I found Mark's (in favour of TCs) arguments quite good and he presented a number of them. I found Frank's (not in favour of TCs) a bit odd. He only had one point, which was that 'users won't like it'. He cites that users need to be able to install bits of software and that this is crucial for them to be able to do their job.

Two thoughts on this.

I bet the vast majority of '3rd Party Software' on users laptops isn't in the 'business critical' category. More likely it's iTunes, Bittorrent and children's 'educational' software.

One assumes that these users are using company supplied equipment. What gives users the right to install other software on their company laptop? You can't go out and modify your company car can you? It's sort of assumed that you just do. If I was in charge of these companies I would ban users owning the root/admin passwords immediately. My own work laptop has nothing on it but Sun supplied software. I have taken the novel step of having my own personal laptop for my stuff (not counting the fact my own laptop is way better than the work supplied one!)

I think they both missed the two real reason TCs haven't yet taken off properly. They need to be wireless (we'd need vpns and WWAN coverage too), and have a laptop form factor. Without the disk drive dragging down the power consumption, laptop style TCs would last for hours longer, be more secure and still be cool enough for users/executives to use on the train to impress everyone else...



( Jan 23 2006, 05:28:15 PM GMT / Jan 23 2006, 05:16:08 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [4]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/thin_clients_in_the_news


Yep, me.
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