Clients

Netbooks are notebooks

There's a bit of an anti-Netbooks meme making the rounds in blogs and on Twitter and the expected push-back from their fans. From where I sit, this is fueled partially by the conflating of product and product category, partially by competitive sniping, and partially by genuine consumer confusion. Let me try to tease those threads apart.

I've been skeptical from pretty much the beginning that there was a bright line distinction between Netbooks and other inexpensive, small form-factor notebooks. And it's this lack of a truly standalone category that analyst Michael Gartenberg is writing about in his … Read more

Will tablets be a tweener?

One of the questions related to client computing that I've been exploring of late is whether we're likely to see a mainstream mobile device or devices emerge between a smartphone and an ultra-portable notebook.

My Illuminata colleague Jonathan Eunice and I debated this subject on a video recently--mostly in the context of long battery life, instant on/off mini-notebooks of various sorts. The HP Jornada 820 of the late 1990s is one possible prototype for such a device, suitably updated for a wirelessly connected world. The stillborn Palm Foleo is another take.

I'm perhaps more skeptical than … Read more

The virtualized client is coming

LAS VEGAS--The Day One keynotes at Citrix Synergy 2009 were about users and desktops. Today was nominally about data centers and clouds--of which there were a variety of announcements. However, Citrix's XenClient ("Project Independence") loomed large as well.

Of the products discussed on stage, XenClient is perhaps furthest from being a fully realized product. But is also offers an intriguing window into how the PC as we know it is likely to fundamentally change over the coming years.

XenClient is a "Type 1" native hypervisor that sits on a PC and hosts one or more … Read more

Citrix CEO: Consumer Web vs. enterprise PC

LAS VEGAS--The consumerization of the Web will be as disruptive to distributed computing as distributed computing was to the mainframe. That was the central theme of Citrix Systems CEO Mark Templeton's keynote speech at this week's Synergy 2009 conference.

This is an oversimplification, of course. Over the years, companies have run their business software in many different ways--not all of which are easily categorized as either mainframe-like or PC-like. One whole era of computing architectures during roughly the 1980s commonly went by the term "client-server." However, if we think of how distributed computing in the enterprise … Read more

Microsoft gets an ad right

[Update: After posting, I realized that some wording was ambiguous. Corrected.]

I've been critical of past Microsoft advertising.

The low point may have been calling customers and potential customers dinosaurs for not upgrading to Office 2003.

But Microsoft advertising, in general, has been at best inconsistent, in that it has often spoken to the needs and desires of Microsoft--as opposed to the needs and desires of its customers. (In all fairness, this is hardly a problem unique to Microsoft's advertising or, indeed, to the advertising that comes out of the the tech industry overall.)

But the company's latest, from the Crispin Porter + Boguksy agency, … Read more

Are catalogs the killer app for Silverlight?

LAS VEGAS--Just like its predecessor a year ago, Silverlight 3 is clearly one of the stars of the Microsoft Mix conference under way here this week.

Silverlight is a Web browser plug-in for Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser. (Silverlight also supports Firefox and Safari browsers and Mac OS X in addition to Microsoft Windows. A primarily Novell-developed plug-in, Moonlight, runs on Linux.) Its initial iteration was narrowly focused on media. However, Silverlight's direction is toward enabling a broad class of "rich Internet applications."

So, for example, Silverlight 3 will allow developers to create lightweight Web … Read more

Why gadget convergence doesn't happen

Given that I travel a fair bit, I'm personally interested in the evolution of the devices that we carry with us on the road.

On the one hand, I don't want to be a parody of Dilbert, carrying a bag full of gadgets that have to be charged, synchronized, and corralled. On the other hand, I'm inclined to agree with this statement from a column by travel writer Joe Brancatelli:

And where, I wonder, is my convergence machine, the one that makes calls flawlessly around the world, doubles as my music play, triples as a fully functioning … Read more