Comments on: Firm bets the time's finally right to chuck desktops

Better bandwidth, rising maintenance costs will prompt companies to consider thin clients managed by third parties, Savvis says.

[groink_hi]

People's work lives are unpredictable...

As the article mentioned, the concept and use of thin clients have been around for years. There are several issues at stake, but I'd like to address just one of them.

I compare thin clients to mass transit. I'm from a small city in Hawaii, where there is no mass transit system like subways and trains. For over 20 years, there's been talk about Honolulu building a mass transit system. Although there are many benefits (save on gas, getting to work faster, etc.), the one factor is that people like "being in control".

What I mean by this is that people like having 100-percent control over whatever they do and use, simply because people in general have a very poor sense of planning ahead in their daily work lives. Let's face it - most people have NO IDEA what they're going to do, either during or at the end of the work day. In the case of mass transit, it would be difficult to carry along your golf clubs, a basketball, bowling ball, tennis racket, and a nice three-piece suit for dining. How are you going to know what kind of mood you'll be in when you leave work? Maybe you'd like to swing the golf clubs, or go to a bar and throw darts. In other words, mass transit are for people who have a fixed schedule in their lives, and they know EXACTLY how their entire day is structured. For the rest of us, a car is handy in that we can throw everything into the car, giving us full independance of our lives, without having to plan ahead.

Linking the mass transit philosophy to our computers, most of us use computers in the same free spirit way. Even at work, most of us really don't have any idea how we'll be using our computers. Maybe at the beginning of the day I'll be reading my e-mail and typing up a letter. And then, all of a sudden, my boss wants me to do something I've never done before, such as producing and burning a DVD presentation, or install and use AutoCAD for the first time because someone sent us a DWG file instead of a PDF. Thin clients are for those people who know EXACTLY how their computing days are structured, and that nothing changes.

That's why I think thin clients will always be a nitch thing, rather than a regular thing. The only way thin clients can totally replace full-on desktop PCs is if our daily work lives are fully structured, predictable, and unchanging.

[Albertv]

Kind of Like the breech at MasterCard

Goody, now Corps can blame the contractor for screw-ups. Of course the lowest bidder will get to do the work and MasterCard can attest to what that actually can cost in business prestige.

[montgomeryburns]

Fire Molly Wood

Fire Molly Wood..