The PC Is Not Dead

Belle writes "Bill Gates has an op-ed in this morning's BW Online, in which he responds to the magazine's question Is the PC dead? with a resounding "No!" and argues that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come." From the article: "The result is that the personal computer has become far more than a cog in the machine of corporate computing -- it's an essential tool for every individual in the organization. Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt."

Comments

Maybe next year, eh?

[soluzar22]

In addition to Bill's reasoning, which I don't entirely follow, there is also the question of the hobbyist/games user. Business users may choose to go thin-client, but in my opinion, the user who is technically-minded will never be satisfied with any of the so-called replacements for the personal computer, and I don't personally think that any of these replacements will ever take off outside of the office.

If businesses switch to the 'thin client' model, or anything similar, then this will be a step backwards, technologically speaking, and it will be a decision which is based entirely on financial motives. Those who appreciate technology will have little reason to follow this lead, and therefore will not.

On the other hand, those home users who do not enjoy technology, who simply wish to treat their computer as a dumb interface to DRMed MP3s and the web/email will probably be delighted with a 'thin client'. There will still continue to be money in the other market for a while, though. As for 'thin clients' in the office, then I say, sure, they will take off there - it's a cost thing. They just won't kill the home PC. That's my take on this.

Last of all: Is it just me or does someone predict this every year? I first heard it in about 1996, and I'm still waiting! This claim wears even more thin with every passing year...

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[theVP]

Have you ever worked in a Citrix environment? Have you ever experienced using a thin-client for the course of a year or more? You might want to consider that fact that the computer is nothing more than a TOOL and not a decoration.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[plehmuffin]

If businesses switch to the 'thin client' model, or anything similar, then this will be a step backwards, technologically speaking, and it will be a decision which is based entirely on financial motives. Those who appreciate technology will have little reason to follow this lead, and therefore will not.

Um, no. It's simply a realization that for some users within an organization, a full fledged workstation is not required. If someone is only using their computer for Office, web and email, it doesn't merit paying for a full workstation; a thin client will suit them just fine. Such a move does not imply a failure to appreciate technology.

Also, I wouldn't quickly right off thin-client server systems as being technologically backwards. It takes some amount of neat tech to make a thin client seem as, or near as, rich as a full workstation.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[oGMo]

Business users may choose to go thin-client, but in my opinion, the user who is technically-minded will never be satisfied with any of the so-called replacements for the personal computer

I would. Definitely. But maybe we're not talking about the same thing; I want modularization. I'd take the following over current offerings in a heartbeat:

• Thin client "terminal" with a focus on graphics capabilities and human interface components (hardware)
• Server backend (which I own the hardware for and have on-site) with massive computational abilities, easy to upgrade and add more capacity, and cluster.
• High bandwidth, low-latency network for streaming media---both ways, so I can push 28-channel audio from my studio gear back to the server.

That would be nice. I could add more terminals where I needed them for a reasonable price (say $100 for a low-end model) and have the benefit of backend processing.

Of course, I guess you could pretty much do this today with some imacs and a server or something. Not for cheap though.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[BoomerSooner]

Not to mention administration. The biggest time-waster at my company is fixing users computers (hell sometimes mine included). Updating, upgrading, trying to hunt down and unreg all the gator entries, ...

Administration costs are insane for large corporations. Thin clients make that task a little more manageable. Only problem is when the main servers go down you're killing not just one user but a whole organization.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[squiggleslash]

I agree. In that sense, the PC will never be dead. Different markets will have different needs, and while individuals have need of computing, they'll have personal computers. These may be highly optimized platforms like games consoles (eg optimized to one type of application) or more universal systems. Time has told us that people are never happy with a single, limited, box - when games consoles went up against home computers, the latter won. Games consoles only came back when it became normal to have both a computer and a console.

It's a li[tt]le like the ocean. You have your sharks and dolphins (big businesses and little businesses, with specific business needs), and you have your regular fish - clownfish, for example, for those who liked "Finding Nemo", and cod. While they all may swim in the same ocean and have similar needs, the fact these needs aren't identical means they end up eating different things. Sharks, for example, will happily eat seals, not so cod. What you end up with is a different style, sharks will not even hunt for their food in the same way as smaller fish. An algae-eater, for example, will constantly be feeding on the walls of coral and other areas where algae may hang out.

In the same way, centralised computer systems may make sense for businesses. But for individuals, families, and other households, they're just inappropriate. A large business can eat a seal and not have to feed again for a while, but an algae-eating games player needs localised power at their fingertips to provide them with the game playing environment they crave. Grandma, wanting to surf the net or write email, will want the computing equivalent of plankton, power available when she needs it, localized to her.

Personal computing will simply never die. It will go through periods of being more or less application specific, but I suspect if you were to draw an image of the average household in 2015, then, like it was in 1995, will you see a PC in every home. Just as you do more with your PC today - manage MP3 archives, view remote web pages, etc - than you did in '95, so will the PC of 2015 be a more sophisticated, more important, engine.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[jaavaaguru]

the computer is nothing more than a TOOL and not a decoration

I disagree. I decorate my room with computers, you insensitive clod. I have one atatched to the wall behind me. This is Slashdot after all.

Citrix sucks compared to X anyway, except on the ease-of-use factor for the majority of business desktop users (open browser, click link on homepage, enter password, application appears). Come to think of it, I've seen X running that way too.

X uses a lot less resources on the machine where the application is actually be executed. It's only a matter of time before people start running apps in Wine on Windows, just so that the output can be displayed in a browser via X11. That'll be the best thing since sliced bread.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[serutan]

In addition to Bill's reasoning, which I don't entirely follow...

You're not the only one. Bill's article distinctly lacked reasoning, at least as would apply to rebutting what Nicholas Carr said. Carr's main point is that modern PCs are ridiculously overpowered for the needs of the typical home or office user. I couldn't agree more, and Bill's predictable road-ahead fluff piece didn't address that point at all. Yeah Bill, we know computers and software are going to keep evolving and all sorts of cool things are going to happen. But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No. That's all Carr was really saying.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Nos.]

I would have to agree. I would love to create a thin client setup at home. I'd love a dump (cheap) terminal in most every room that is small enough to not require a lot of space, but large enough for a reasonable sized keyboard (email,ssh,etc) but is mostly just screen for websurfing, getting weather/news updates, etc. Add one in the kitchen tied into a recipe database. A webcam and mike in the babies room and a portable screen with speakers and presto, instant baby monitor, with color screen. With the click of a button start playing soft music when the baby won't go back to sleep.

There's no end to the possibilities of low power dump terminals that can do high bandwidth low CPU tasks like streaming video/audio (VoIP, PVR, Video on Demand, etc) and the simple things like check email and the web.

Now, if only I had the time and money to set this all up

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Foofoobar]

How is this a step backwards? Maybe only because thin clients came BEFORE the PC. But in all other senses, it's a step forward. IT depts now realize that end-users don't care about security; their passwords suck, they download cursurs and other spyware loaded apps and they wil actually answer that phishing email!

Anything that relies upon the end-user for security is a potential threat to the network. But by giving them thin clients with limited apps that they can access from a server (or cluster), you are giving them the same functionallity that they need to do their jobs with none of the added risk.

At Amazon from 95-97, we all ran thin clients with web apps and we never had a problem ... in the offices. :)

It's only a step back for the end-user; it's a step forward for the IT dept that has to support the PC of the end-user.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[eno2001]

Well... I moved my family to a thin client system based on RedHat 9 a few years back. So far it's worked out great. There is very little functionality that most users need that require a fullblown PC sitting in front of them. The current list of apps we use in thin client model are:

VNC +GDM - Remote Desktop Functionality
GNOME - Desktop Environment
Firefox - Web
Thunderbird - Mail
Sunbird - Calendaring
OpenOffice.org - Office Apps
GIMP - Image editing
Xine - Media player
XMMS - MP3/OGG player
WINE - For those "must have" Windows apps/games
GAIM - IM
DOSBox - For old DOS games
OpenVPN - To remotely access our VNC desktops

Printing is handled by the centrally attached Epson Photo printer and the "thin clients" are laptops with wireless NICs, custom scripts and VNC clients.

It works very well for our needs. I would say that the only needs not met by this set up are things like scanning photos (since the server is headless in the basement, putting a scanner down there would be inconvenient) and 3D games that need fast screen performance. This would be better if I moved to 802.11G probably. (hehehe.. I've played Quake 3 using VNC over an SSH tunnel viw a DSL line. Too slow to be playable, but it works) My point with all of this? It's possible to do this sort of thing. The fact that a non-geek like me can set it up indicates that it can certainly be done by experienced developers. It's just that no one has tried hard enough or had a decent plan to do it. Realistically, if the bandwidth was available on a wireless device and it was no more than a display, kb, mouse and audio terminal for a really powerful backend box, this WOULD take off for the home user. Why should our desktops be married to one location? That's just stupid. Your desktop should be accesible everywhere with all functionality available. The only thing that needs to catch up is bandwidth.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[soluzar22]

Well, in answer to this point, I grant that it can be a functional step forward, but it will always be a technological step backwards. I did not characterise the nature of this move as a step backwards in order to look down upon it, since I think that for many businesses it is a good idea. I said, or intended to, that it was unlikely to kill the PC.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[truthsearch]

Time has told us that people are never happy with a single, limited, box - when games consoles went up against home computers, the latter won. Games consoles only came back when it became normal to have both a computer and a console.

I don't think the popularity (or lack there of) of game consoles ever had anything directly to do with their single limited use. PCs were "winning" when they had better hardware, better games, and networking. Consoles came back when they caught up with hardware, expanded their game offerings, and allowed more human competition.

In the games division it's whatever gives the best experience that wins. Most people don't care if the machine can be used for other purposes. When they want to play games they'll pay for the best method.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[arkanes]

Administration is where it makes sense, but I still think thin client is a step backward. A full-powered workstation is *cheaper* than a thin client. It's stupid to waste all this computing power, only to channel more and more money into more and more powerfull app servers. Better admin tools (and actually, despite the lack of pre-rolled tools, Linux actually shines here) are what we need, not a fall back to dumb terminals. We've got incredibly cheap computing power that would have been unimaginable even 20 years ago, lets not waste it all - design ways to leverage to power of workstations while alleviating the administrative overhead.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I spy with my little eye - something beginning with [tt] ! ;-)

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[WinterSolstice]

I'm working on something like this right now. It has been my dream since the mid-nineties, and I am finally approaching the point where it is financially/logically possible. Wireless, DVD, digital audio, bluetooth headsets, etc. These make it a real possibility, for me at least.

-WS

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[jgiltner]

Well, lets see I got invloved in mainframe computers in the early 80's. Back then "departmental computing" was going to wipe mainframes out. Well they are still around and still growing and I still hear that "something" (Client/Server, "the web", Windows, Unix, Linux, etc.) is going to wipe them out.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[operagost]

Isn't that introducting a lot of needless overhead? Even VNC would probably be more efficient. I highly doubt that Citrix's ICA protocol is slower than a JVM on top of X11 on top of a Windows emulator.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[squiggleslash]

Games consoles seem to be doing remarkably well right now despite the fact that just about any off-the-shelf PC has better hardware once you put in a modern graphics card. Indeed, I don't think any of the big 3 were ahead of the PC when they first came out. About the only way in which they were/are superior was in price.

Maybe that's it...

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Foofoobar]

Which is why I precluded my statement with the same; technologically it is a step backwards but for all functional purposes, it is a step forward.

Hell, while I thought about this, I envisioned local market ISPs selling cheap thin clients and then setting up a services side to stream applications to the clients through a small cluster.

In alot of senses, web services will thrive once we kill the PC. And thus, it is also a step forward as well.

Just as with code, sometimes to have to rewrite the underlying base to improve fnctionallity.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Unkle]

A full-powered workstation is *cheaper* than a thin client.

I think you've hit the nail on the head right there--PCs are so cheap today. When you can get a full Dell (just for example) with monitor for only a few hundred dollars, thin clients have a much harder time being justified--especially since you're going to need some kind of server for them to run off of, the cost of which would be spread out accross all clients when comparing to a stand-alone PC. And, for most work uses, these cheapo PCs are more than enough. If you need more (i.e., graphic artists), you probably wouldn't be going with a thin client anyway.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[tsotha]

If businesses switch to the 'thin client' model, or anything similar, then this will be a step backwards, technologically speaking, and it will be a decision which is based entirely on financial motives. Those who appreciate technology will have little reason to follow this lead, and therefore will not.

Of course it's a financial decision. All decisions companies make regarding legal actions are financial decisions. Why is this a problem?

As for 'thin clients' in the office, then I say, sure, they will take off there - it's a cost thing.

The lion's share of the cost for PCs is the maintennence. If by "cost thing" you mean cutting down on the amount of PC support they have to do, you are correct.

In any event, with the proliferation of trojans and viruses most companies have the PC locked down to such an extent it's essentially a thin client anyway. Where I work we can't install anything, change any system settings, or write files to local drives. Thank God I have a Linux box to do work on - the PCs are crippled to the point you can't do anything but read email and edit MS Office documents.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thin clients are still expensive right now because there isn't any demand. There isn't really any reason for them to be costly.

Also, it's a waste of computing power, but I mean, what else are people going to do? Not everyone runs computationally expensive applications. Even the computer I'm using right now is massively overpowered for what I do.

Perhaps the best idea is to use some sort of background SETI-like app, and sell units of computing time to other companies. (Wasn't there some dot.com that tried to do that?)

Anyhow. That'd still be side-stepping the main issue, which is that most people don't need all the power. They'd be better off with thin-clients.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[FatherOfONe]

You miss Bill's main point.

You will need all that extra processing power and hard drive to drive all the spyware, adware and viruses that will be comming out.

Now I am still trying to understand why the cashier at walmart needs a full fledged PC, just to sell me my stuff.

Or any call center agent....

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[leshert]

A full-powered workstation is *cheaper* than a thin client.

Cheaper in what way? Don't compare the cash you put down for a new low-end Dell with the prices quoted from the Net appliance press releases--compare the per-month lease costs (which is what most large companies do anyway) plus the administration costs (which usually dwarf the hardware costs over the life of the machine).

You're also subscribing to a false dichotomy--the choice is not between "dumb terminals" and fully-loaded workstations. Putting a high-powered CPU with sufficient RAM into a workstation that that boots from the net takes care of both concerns.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it me, or does anyone else think that a reply that starts with "Um,.." make you think the poster is a huge prick?

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spelled 'coming' incorrectly - strike 1

Shop at Walmart - strike 2

Used the security/freedom quote as a .sig - strike 3, you're out!

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[ThogScully]

The fact that a non-geek like me can set it up...

Go back and re-read your post... That seems to be some big geek mojo to me. ;-)
-N

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[sahala]

Time has told us that people are never happy with a single, limited, box - when games consoles went up against home computers, the latter won. Games consoles only came back when it became normal to have both a computer and a console.

Can you cite some evidence to support this, or at least tell us which durations of time you're talking about? When was it abnormal to have both a computer and a console? They essentially serve different needs, even when it comes to gaming.

I don't think you're making an unreasonable statement here, but my (admittedly cursory) observation, more people seem to have gaming consoles than gaming PCs, if only because the initial cost is so low. I'm talking about mainstream, not our little geek world.

Your original premise is indisputably correct however (although you probably didn't need to go through a lengthy sea analogy). Yes...different people have different needs.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[wwest4]

> A full-powered workstation is *cheaper* than a thin client.

This is usually false, both in terms of hardware cost, lifetime expectancy, power consumption, and deployment cost, yadda yadda. Any way you slice it, a workstation is not cheaper than any but the most unfairly-priced and poorly-designed thin client.

> It's stupid to waste all this computing power, only to channel more and more
> money into more and more powerfull app servers.

A bunch of single processer machines, each with its own board, memory, IO, fans, footprint and power supply (w/ AC-DC transformer) is neccessarily more "wasteful" in terms of resources than a WTS running on an SMP machine. That's basic physics. When the cost between one and the other becomes insignificant, then you start to have a point; or if you're rich enough, maybe it doesn't matter. Nowadays, though, it usually does.

> We've got incredibly cheap computing power that would have been unimaginable
> even 20 years ago, lets not waste it all - design ways to leverage to power of
> workstations while alleviating the administrative overhead.

That's exactly what VM clusters and terminal servers do. For workstations, the best you can do is: imaging, or scripted installs with SMS/Netinstall; either case requires a server infrastructure anyway. So you're back to having thick clients AND extra machines in the back room (which are idle most of the time, like fat clients).

This is an age-old argument, and there are sometimes cases where thick clients are a must-have (3D or even 2D graphics, or non multi-user aware apps, for example). But most users can go without and suffer no loss in productivity; hell, they can even benefit, because it's easier and cheaper to engineer reliability into the system.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[JWW]

Yes, but with thin clients, I can change an application for 50 users from my desk, ONCE. Its that versus updating 50 machines. Even automated updates don't come close to the ease of thin clients as there's always some where the update didn't go right and needs to be re-done, by hand.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[squiggleslash]

Most of the eighties, at least in Britain, and from what I can Google, in the US and Europe too. Games consoles rose during the seventies, and sales then disappeared rapidly in the early eighties when the home computing boom was in full swing. People prefered Commodore 64s and Sinclair Spectrums as they were "full computers", as opposed to Atari, et al's, best efforts at the time.

Wikipedia has an interesting article about the sudden crash of many manufacturers in 1983. One of the few survivors was Atari who cancelled the 7800 (bringing it back later in the eighties but still to no avail.) I didn't really see people buying consoles, or see them taken seriously, until the early nineties, when Nintendo started to make serious headway in the US and Sega in Europe, the latter after several false starts. Both only really succeeded because of the strength of the Japanese market during the eighties.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[RevMike]

But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No.

I do consulting for a major Wall Street firm. Their VPN/Remote Access solution includes the ability to use Citrix to access Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc. 80% of their workforce can access all the tools they need to do their day-to-day job from any half way decent internet connected pc.

On top of that, if someone needs to access a non-standard app, they can use Citrix to access their own desktop via Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connectivity.

Even working as a developer, the only time I've ever needed to actually go to the desktop is to insert a usb thumb drive. Citrix has solutions for this as well, however, allowing you to use local USB devices like thumbdrives and printers as if they were attached to the remote machine.

With this level of remote computing, it is very easy to "pull the PC's from the desktop" for most users. Just assuming for a moment that you want to continue with a Microsoft based environment, you'd probably do the following...

1. Put together a redundant farm of Windows Server 2003 boxes in a datacenter or two. You probably need one high end server for every 50 or so desktops wish to replace.
2. Reimage all the older machines, putting on them a very locked down OS. You might put a Citrix client or VNC client on each, or you may just use Windows RDC.
3. When the user log in to "their PC", a connection is instead made to a remote session on the server.
4. Only a few copies of software like Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office need to be installed, maintained, and patched.
5. Backups can be made in one place.
6. When more power is needed one server needs to be upgraded, not 50 desktops.
7. The desktops need far less maintenence and administration. They are appliances with no valuable data on them. They last longer, and when they do need to be replaced they can be replaced with a Wyse WinTerm.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[plehmuffin]

um, yeah, I am.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[hairyfeet]

Wouldn't it be smarter just to use cheap desktops and with the price of harddives so cheap use a goback style app on a second drive to allow the user to just "go back" before they screwed it up without losing their documents? I work in a little pc shop and we got a bunch of gateway astro pc's with goback installed and with a 128 meg ram chip they make wonderful clients for the local offices and they work great with grannys too.When the user does something wrong they just "go back"to before they screwed the pooch and fix it themselves. If you were to develop an app(which if you do,send me a copy)which did a goback style restore function with a automated update on network anti spyware/virus app built in (so they wouldn't reinstall the junk)it would make the perfect work client,IMO,anyway.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[McDutchie]

Administration costs are insane for large corporations. Thin clients make that task a little more manageable. Only problem is when the main servers go down you're killing not just one user but a whole organization.

The solution to that problem is called "regular back-ups".

After all, even with a thick-client model, files are usually stored centrally, so when the server goes down, people still have their applications but no files to work with. That's not that great of a difference.

Of course, a smart thin-client admin will make a Plan B to restore all the back-ups on another machine (perhaps one that is normally in use as a thin client but has more RAM and a HD), whether it's a thin or thick client setup.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Miamicanes]

A high-powered PC might be "ridiculously overpowered" for reading email, running Excel, running Word, OR surfing the web... but the last time I checked, users tend to do all the above more or less simultaneously. Try opening Word, Excel, seven or eight instances of IE or Mozilla, AND an email client, and even the much-scorned 3GHz PC w/512mb doesn't seem quite as fast anymore.

A few years ago, I used to work for a small company where I had to administer the other employees' PCs in addition to my usual software development tasks (ouch).

I noticed something interesting... giving users faster machines had a an almost-magical way of fixing 90% of their problems. Placebo? No... try "naive users with fast, responsive PCs don't end up generating dozens of queued input events while their PCs are apparently hung because they're too slow -- and when those queued events finally fire, Windows has a good chance of going down in flames."

I think dual-core CPUs are the most profound breakthrough this century. If you think about how typical office PCs are REALLY used, most users would be MUCH happier with a (nominally slower) dual core CPU that rarely hangs the UI due to blocking events than with a single CPU twice the speed. You can blame Microsoft and some questionable architectural decisions they made along the way to XP (like running everything through Explorer's single-threaded name resolver), but the fact is, most users EASILY engage in "heavy multitasking".

As for administrability, what Microsoft REALLY needs to do is bundle Virtual PC with Longhorn. That way, corporate PCs could have their core OS and apps locked down without crippling the more advanced (and vocal) power users (giving them instead a neatly-sandboxed "back yard" to play in).

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[timeOday]

Well, have you tried it? I have. In fact my wife's main computer is a 233mhz laptop running VNC. She likes having her same desktop wherever in the house, and I can pull it up from work for tech support (naughty but useful).

However, I never use that VNC laptop. It's just too sluggish. (I would use X if it were any better). The fact is a pretty powerful terminal IS necessary if what you want to do is watch movies on it. My little boy's main application is Flash web games, guess how well they run on a remote display? (They have sound by the way).

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Taladar]

Hint: You don't need the JVM if your apps run on the server and if you use a JVM it doesn't have to run in a Windows Emulator, just native Windows apps have to.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Tandoori Haggis]

Some oufits go half way and supply the user with a PC but run it as a thin client with very limited local resources....

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[iabervon]

The shift to thin clients will be piece by piece. Lots of families these days have a computer per person. Before long, the effort of keeping data while upgrading these will make network-attached storage worthwhile for the family.

I wouldn't be too surprised if the home of 2015 has all of the storage on a file server appliance, and the things that act like PCs boot off of USB sticks and look a lot like flat panel iMacs.

Desktops will never offload the processing power, because processing is cheaper than communications. They will offload the storage, because it is beneficial to have that accessible. "Thin clients" will primarily not have local storage, aside from removable media; otherwise, they will be similar to current PCs, because it is necessary or cost-effective to do everything else per-client. But the "identity" of a computer, as seen by the user, is really tied to the local storage, so users will feel like they have thin clients, and say things like "I like to use my computer in the family room because the processor is faster there", like they now say, "I like to play my video games in the family room, because the TV is bigger there."

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Taladar]

And with thin clients 50 users can go home and have some unplanned free time if the server takes an unexpected timeout...

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[arkanes]

10 PCs that can run, say, Office will be cheaper than one big machine than can run 10 copies of Office (plus virtualization overhead, of course). You need far, far more server resources to run all your applications at a central point than if you distribute them to your workstations. Further, you need to engineer a lot more reliability into those resources, because if they go away *everyone* is down, rather than one user. Basically, you can view an office full of workers as being a big collection of parellel computations. There's no need to run them all at a single point when you can run them all in parallel insteaad.

The problem, basically, is that IT administrators suck. Address that issue (with better tools, more admins, better training, whatever) and that will address the problems with PCs in the office. All the problems that thin-client environments claim to address are administrative, rather than technical.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[nickname225]

If your office is anything like mine - with almost all work being done on server hosted databases - fat client users take time off too when the server goes down.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[gewalker]

I'm been writing Windows apps for a long time. With a well-engineered app (no Visual Basic for starters) this is not an issue. Deploying and updating well-engineering windows apps across scads of workstations is simply not a problem, done it many times.

You must lock down windows to keep all of the trojans, trashy games, etc. that will destroy your stable environmment otherwise.

Need I point out that I've seen thin client apps having problems on certain machines? The browser itself is very fat and full of inconsistencies.

Lots of app can be engineered either way without particular consequence, however the PC can run thin-client apps just fine, where a think client can not run a fat app where it makes sense.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

modern PCs are ridiculously overpowered for the needs of the typical home or office user.

I often see this claim but don't quite get it. If we never should evolve from yesterdays "typical" use of a computer we would all be using punchcards on monochrome terminals.

Word and Excel and Web surfing isn't all a PC can be used for. If we forget gaming, what about editing family videos? No need for power to go that route? Or DVR. This is moving out of power user land and to ordinary users, in part because of... better pc's :)

Heck even processing pictures from 8 mpixel digital cameras and ripping/converting music takes to much time on a slow pc.

The PC is evolving, and the question if we need more (640k enough for everybody, right? :) is always asked, and answered by new possibilities.

(and, btw, try changing complex pivot tables in Exel on a slow PC - it may not be that many users program so advanced spreadsheets themselves, but many use them in an organization. They can actually be quite damn impressive.)

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[aichpvee]

Are you thinking of the one that was going to pay users like .01$/hour to run their software and then sell that computing time to other companies? Or was it soemthing else?

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[recursiv]

So your point is that it easier to keep 50 machines up and running than 1? That's going to be a tough sell.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

re: browser

thats why people who do heavy browsing usually have a local browser.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Citizen of Earth]

Last of all: Is it just me or does someone predict this every year? I first heard it in about 1996, and I'm still waiting! This claim wears even more thin with every passing year...

We always overestimate change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. Thin will be in in the long term because it is cheaper. Period.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[gad_zuki!]

>But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web?

Home users deserve power for the money they spend. Period. And they use it.

Okay, I dont know anyone with a 19inch LCD, so lets toss that right out the window for now. Any decent monitor will due and considering most people buy their computers in one package deals, they usually get a sub-par monitor to begin with, not a bad-ass LCD.

3Ghz processor? Well, whats so wrong with that, when the microprocessor industry is constantly developing chips of this speed and thanks to the economics of scale these chips are affordable. That means the home user doesnt experience noticable slowdowns as the CPU hits 100% 99% of time. What exactly is the alternative? Capping them off at 1ghz for the sake of ideology, charging them more because no one makes 1ghz chips anymore, and then telling them to shut up when they complain about slow performance with games, CAD, etc.

160gb hard drive? Heaven forbid we let home users store media files like tv shows, movies, and photos on their computers. Maybe congress and the RIAA along with the MIAA and people like you can lobby for a "20 gigs is enough" HD law for "the people."

>to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web?

This is ignorance and elitism. *Some* home users only do these things, but you'll find the digital revolution in full-effect in many homes. Broadband, digital cameras, video editing (yes, people without CS degrees can do this now!), etc.

You forgot to add:

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

or

The market for computers will consist only of the 5 richest kings of Europe

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[n0tWorthy]

Get out your sniffer and compare X to ICA on a local LAN and over a international WAN. The ICA protocol is leaner and faster than X in every way, especially if you don't have a local window manager built into your X terminal. ICA also beats the snot out of VNC and pcAnywhere over the LAN and WAN. In fact the further the distance and the smaller the bandwidth the better the ICA protocol is compared to anything else.

Also, IMHO, X still looks a lot like Windows 3.1 graphics. Kind of clunky. The KDE stuff on my Linux box has gotten a bit better with the last couple of releases but I still get some strange artifacts sometimes.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[fitten]

Have you priced thin clients? There's not much difference between getting (a modern) one of them and a regular PC and simply network booting it.

The main reason to go to thin clients is saving time and money on administration.

Thin clients won't be viable in the home until broadband is a bit faster (10Mb at least I'd think). Even then, as you state, home users will want to play games and stuff and those don't translate to thin clients very well.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

lets see...

my engineering dept has 15 people on a 2.4GHz 1GB RAM ICA/RDP server, and we all have thin clients.

we use this server for mail/office, and its more than enough.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

and then they lose the cheap-pc's due to moving parts, and dont gain the benefits of thin client manageability.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[McDutchie]

If businesses switch to the 'thin client' model, or anything similar, then this will be a step backwards, technologically speaking, and it will be a decision which is based entirely on financial motives.

As someone who recently switched over an office's mixed Windows network to a thin-client setup based on Slackware and the excellent Linux Terminal Server Project, I claim that this is not a step backwards (technologically or otherwise), but simply a step in a different direction. Yes, it's a lot cheaper all right, but that is not the only motive. It's also:

• a lot faster for the users: the thin clients boot up in no time and everything else doesn't need to boot because it's already up. Also, because Linux caches everything and uses shared memory, programs start up very fast after the first user has started them up for the first time. Finally, everyone gets to profit from the big fat server's execution speed (no, it doesn't degrade significantly from being shared; load is usually under 0.20).
• more flexible for the users: their own user environment is available from any office computer, instead of being tied to one PC, and can even be accessed remotely via SSH.
• a lot more practical for the sysadmin: everything needs to be upgraded only once and everyone immediately uses the new version. No need for manual client installation or risky and expensive central upgrade distribution systems. With SSH, everything can even be safely managed remotely.
• quite extensible: nothing says you are limited to one server. You can either distribute tasks over different servers (programs can run on different computers and be displayed on the same terminal screen, and users won't even notice), or you can combine LTSP with OpenMOSIX and make the server and all the clients participate in a big happy cluster! Imagine running The GIMP and having twenty computers transparently divide the rendering work among them...

In short, the thin client model is highly underrated. It has a lot of possibilities, some of which are either hard to realize or plainly not available on traditional PC setups. It's not universally the best solution but for offices they are typically very suitable.

And no, the PC is not dead and is not about to die. With that I agree entirely.

___________
* Yes, I'm being civilized. ;)

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[gad_zuki!]

And how many families can afford a systems admin to do this and the support they need.

A geek anecdote is hardly specific to the home market.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[oliverthered]

You buy a full dell PC for a few hundred dollars, put a few monitors and keyboards hanging off of it and setup multiple clients on the same box.

Most office users still need word, the company I used to work for had a lot of big iron
The users has a PC for email, word documents, outlook etc.. but mainly worked via a text terminal.

Hell, I still spend most of my time on the console.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Adam9]

Excuse me, but I work at a call center (Support Desk) and we absolutely need our P4 2.6ghz HT processors with 512mb RAM. Otherwise, World of Warcraft and BZFlag will have too low of a frame rate.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the one I was thinking of was going to pay users per computing 'block', rather than a flat rate. Doesn't really matter though, does it? Especially since the company went bankrupt a few years ago...

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[1_interest_1]

Worked great how?

Keeping them off of the family PeeCee? :-)

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[wwest4]

> 10 PCs that can run, say, Office will be cheaper than one big machine than
> can run 10 copies of Office (plus virtualization overhead, of course)

Are you including about hardware, environment, administration, maintenance...? Probably not.

> Further, you need to engineer a lot more reliability into those resources,
> because if they go away *everyone* is down, rather than one user.

Except that companies care about man-hours, and all things being equal, it doesn't matter in your example. If you have one 10-user machine that has 1 hour of downtime per year, and 10 1-user machines that have 1 hour of downtime per year, you have, in both cases, 10 man-hours of downtime.

The practical reality is that it's cheaper/more efficient to engineer reliability at a central point, versus at each node. Furthermore, the amount of downtime is a function of two things - failure rate, and time needed to repair a failure. If a system is in a server room, and not in 10 different locations, how do you think that effects the time needed for repair?

Another practical reality is that when you centralize, you need less machine per person, because 10 users are not using 100% of 1 CPU/RAM/disk etc. all the time. You get economy by putting all the CPU, RAM and disk in one place. 2-4 CPUs versus 10 CPUs, in your example.

> The problem, basically, is that IT administrators suck. Address that issue
> (with better tools, more admins, better training, whatever)

Hey, thanks :) I personally am comfortable (and trained and equipped, by the way) to work in both types of environment. However, for a business trying to make money, a correctly-engineered thin-client architecture has clear advantages over a thick client setup. The only "problem" is deciding what actually makes sense for your environment.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[hackstraw]

Carr's main point is that modern PCs are ridiculously overpowered for the needs of the typical home or office user. I couldn't agree more, and Bill's predictable road-ahead fluff piece didn't address that point at all. Yeah Bill, we know computers and software are going to keep evolving and all sorts of cool things are going to happen. But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No.

Do people need an H1 or any SUV for that matter to go back and forth to work, fetch groceries, and tote the kids back and forth to soccer practice?

Yes!

Or is it no?

In fact, most people drive smaller more task oriented vehicles for doing these things, and the same is for computers. I'm probably more of a power user than most people, but my humble 1.25GHz PowerBook with an 80 Gig hd is fine for me. At times I do wish I had a little more horsepower in the CPU department, but I would not sacrifice battery life for it.

Now, if a 3GHz 160Gb drive computer with a 19-inch LCD screen were $500. Why not use it? The only downside would be the power usage of the CPU. Actually, a 19inch LCD would probably pay for itself vs a 17 or possibly 15inch CRT in a year's time of usage by power alone.

My point, is that in a capitalist driven society, you can basically get whatever anyone is willing to pay for. Actual need is irrelevant. Perception of need and price are what is important. Somebody, somewhere is making these PC purchases (probably a slashdotter:). Like I said, if something is an overkill in every department besides price, it will sell. Actually, I see PCs getting like cars. All cars are OK for driving, but its up to the purchaser to figure out what is important to them in making a decision on a purchase.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Ogerman]

"Thin clients" will primarily not have local storage, aside from removable media; otherwise, they will be similar to current PCs, because it is necessary or cost-effective to do everything else per-client.

Precisely.. this is the part where Sun went wrong and Gates simply doesn't get. "Thin client" does not necessarily mean "200Mhz. processor and 32mb RAM running as a remote X terminal." That attempt indeed failed miserably as a mainstream solution. It's all about network storage and ideally network booting as well. (Though I would not be surprised to see solid-state local storage for caching and disconnected operation..)

Of course, this is all quite contrary to MS's plans for the PC Desktop, where an (expensive) OS platform is still relevant due to shunning industry web standards and pushing their own proprietary equivalents (XAML, Avalon, et.al.) I predict this will ultimately fail because commoditization won't have for it.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Wyse Winterms...wow. Been a while since I have heard those. At first I was going to say what is the point cuz they cost lots of bucks, but then I saw the cost of them now. Wow. 195 bucks for the terminal with a 3 year warantee. They even have them with a WiFi option as well as the ability to plug in USB Key drives to copy data. Pretty cool. If they ever let more then 2 people login to a regular XP machine, I want one of these.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[rmcrob]

Also, I wouldn't quickly right off thin-client server systems as being technologically backwards.

Do thin clients have grammar checkers?

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[wwest4]

Exactly -- though it's useful to use thin, old PCs as a migration path to a sturdier terminal once the PSU or hard drive dies.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

PCs may be ridiculously overpowered today, but companies such as Microsoft still manage to write inefficient programs that bring them to their knees.

In the days of the 4.77MHz Intel processor, there were good programs that did useful work, and were small enough to reside on the 360kB boot diskette along with DOS. Computers have become 500 times faster, RAM is 1000 times bigger, programs have grown 200 times larger, and they seem to process data about the same speed as before. Other than GUI interfaces, what have we gained? I suspect it's a conspiracy between the hardware manufacturers and software writers to force upgrades every couple of years!

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

algae-eating games player
Hey, I resemble that remark!

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Shalda]

The fact that a non-geek like me can set it up indicates that it can certainly be done by experienced developers.

Truly sir, you contradict yourself. Anyone running a wireless Linux thin-client network out of their house is inherently a geek. No matter how many nights a week you play softball, attend the opera, or whatever it is you may do, you are most assuredly a geek. Fortunately, you seem to have found the proper support group.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please elaborate on how you got remote sound?

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please post a short write up detailing how you configured everything? Especially VNC and GDM. Thanks!

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[ceswiedler]

That's not only true for thin-client setups: most thick-client offices have servers (and other hardware) which, if they go down, also provide unplanned free time.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

if you're on a local switched network, i would take X over ICA, any day of the week. why? because the X environment was designed to work transparently, and ICA is an ugly-ass hack.

if you are on any type of bandwidth limited, or unswitched network, ICA is clearly better.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[timmarhy]

nonsense.
do you know why people moved to fat desktop's in the frist place? marketing, not techncial reasons. i will list the technical benfits
1. terminals have no moving parts
2. cheaper
3. centrally managed
4. very easy to roll out.
a typical ms desktop pc can't even compare. i admin org's with both and the one with terminals, i get 1 support call a month at the most.
your arguement relies on "we have the power lets us it" but you never will. corperate users don't need 3d graphics and a 3ghz cpu. instead of "lets use it" how about "let's use it wisely"?

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[cmacb]

All of which leads me to wonder whether Bill is just that much out of touch with reality or simply saying that which will be good for Microsoft (in his opinion).

His notion of ubiquitous computing would be well served if Microsoft had either closed shop, or followed other's lead years ago. My Palm Pilot has never rebooted, and since batteries last two months at a time I've never had to do a "restore" on my todo list. People expect (and should expect) hardware to "just work", a goal that Microsoft has fallen far short of at every opportunity.

Ultimately whether the computing power is on the desktop, centralized or a bit of both should not be noticeable by the user and it is not the sort of thing that should require constant downloads or complete OS replacements every 2 years. Nor, in the long run, is it something that should cost $400 for either hardware, software, or the combination.

Bill's article, and recent pronouncements by Balmer ($100 computers) ring hollow when you realize that Microsoft has stood in the way of these goals from their inception (intentionally or not).

All I can say about their recent attempts at being "visionaries" is that I hope they get their way. Now what remains to be seen is whether Microsoft will be a part of the solution or whether, as in the past, the solution will have to work around Microsoft leaving it to play catch-up and attempt to rewrite history.

The easiest way to have a lot of predictions come true is to predict everything.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[jgrahn]

Also, I wouldn't quickly right off thin-client server systems as being technologically backwards. It takes some amount of neat tech to make a thin client seem as, or near as, rich as a full workstation.

You're from the Windows world, right? Getting a few Unix servers to advertise themselves to a network of X terminals is trivial, and has been so for at least fifteen years. I've worked at a company with such a setup, and I failed to see the disadvantages compared to having my own CPU and disk. And in that particular case, we usually had a dozen heavy simulations running on each server ...

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

not network boot.

network booting sucks big hairy mooseballs. trust me on this, it absolutely, positively sucks the big one.

local boot into minimal OS, local apps on removable media, local data on removable media, remote apps on servers, and remote data on servers.

that, is the future.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[timmarhy]

we aren't talking about some pussy little 10 pc office. "You need far, far more server resources to run all your applications at a central point than if you distribute them to your workstations" what the hell do you base that on? since your talking about "10 pc's" i can safely assume it's not experience. the problem is, that users don't like to be forced to do things correctly, which is what thin clients enable you to do. they like to be able to plug in their usb hd and use the company internet to download porn and mp3's. this is the reason fat desktops were so successfully marketed in the first place, because it took control from admins and the pointy heads like the idea of haveing them.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Ogerman]

network booting sucks big hairy mooseballs. trust me on this, it absolutely, positively sucks the big one.

I've done Linux network boot installations before and they work just fine once configured properly.

local boot into minimal OS, local apps on removable media, local data on removable media, remote apps on servers, and remote data on servers.

Replace "local" with "locally cached" and I'll agree with that statement. Who wants to have to go around updating hundreds of removable media devices every time the OS or certain apps change? Putting everything on the network is every administrator's dream. With OSS, it's even better because there's no seat-counting licensing hassles.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[timmarhy]

another thing people aren't considering, is which to trust more, a $500 top of the line scsi disk in a clean well maintained server room, or a scabby cheap shit ide from dell in a pc sitting under the desk gathering dust? i know which is going to fail first

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting how /. users repeatedly bring up the oft-quoted (though completely false) allegation that BillG once said, "640K should be enough for anyone" and ridicule that statement and when he says completely the opposite you ridicule him for that. Admit it... you're just looking to find fault; if BillG said the sky was blue you'd all be arguing that it's more an off-green colour.

The fact is that RIGHT NOW, most users do not need 3GHz PCs... however, we've been in a period of limbo for a few years now waiting for the next killer app to come along and make use of all that horsepower.

In 1982 no one would have thought we'd have the horsepower to edit video on a home PC and no one would have thought we'd need anywhere near that amount of power on the desktop. The fact is that we quite simply don't know what is yet to come - many technologies are merging, delivery mechanisms and networks are morphing into new entities. To make a statement that "No one needs X or ever will" is silly... time has disproven such short-sightedness over and over... yet here on /. you'd rather make yourself look the fool than admit BillG might be right. How silly. How petty. How ridiculous.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Price, yes (especially when you consider that the price for reasonably modern graphics cards start at the same price-point as a top-end console), but consoles also have the advantages of not needing to be upgraded or updated (a few exceptions exist, I'll admit), not having to worry about interactions with the device much beyond "stick the game in, press Power, start mashing buttons on the controller", and knowing that any piece of software/hardware you can find for it will work on the machine (no need to worry about minimum system requirements and the like). Also, the fact that console games are easy to rent probably helps some.

I myself am definitely more of a PC gamer, but it doesn't seem strange to me that consoles are as popular as they are.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[tchuladdiass]

Actually the reason people moved to "fat clients" is because you could create a local budget forcast report using Lotus 123 in about an hour, whereas to get the MIS guys to do the same it would take several months and a big charge to your budget.
Also, the mainframe word processor kinda sucked.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[rking]

When was it abnormal to have both a computer and a console?

Round about Commodore 64 time.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

I've done netboot installs with over 7000 seats, in 500+ geographic locations, and they suck hairy mooseballs.

you're right with the "locally cached" thing. ROX is a good model. i should have been more

The point of the removable storage with local apps is to mitigate the "but i cant work if the server is down" problem.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[eno2001]

Here is the link that explains how to use OpenSSH and VNC to establish a "remote desktop" session: http://slashdot.org/~eno2001/journal/97277

Down near the end of that JE is a link to an old account of mine that explains how to use VNC and GDM together for session management. It's all pretty straightforward. I'll admit that one problem with my 'vncconnect' script is that if the remote desktop was left connected on one laptop, it will get disconnected by your new connection. This, in and of itself isn't a problem. What is a problem is that the OpenSSH tunnel (and esd server if used) will still be running on the other system. Occasionally I have to go back in and clean up the left over processes. I need to write a little more logic into the script to check for those orphaned processes. Not really a showstopper though...

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[realkiwi]

In addition to Bill's reasoning, which I don't entirely follow...

You are very generous. The guy does not have a gramme of common sense. And do you really believe that living as he has over the last few years that he is still in touch with a mere mortals financial reality...

He has no clue

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[sahala]

Ok this makes sense then. I was thinking the 90s-now timeframe.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[superpulpsicle]

Hey man well said. People are starting to distribute their functions. I know people who used to carry a laptop just to play Mp3s. Once portable Mp3 players came out, that's 1 less job for the laptop.

Overtime, PDAs and other gadgets will make the PC obsolete. Console for games. Routers for networking. Tivo boxes. Etc. Etc.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[tomhudson]

An algae-eater, for example, will constantly be feeding on the walls of coral

Continuing the analogy to cafeterias and fish, it seems that most PC users are algae eaters (they *like* their slime from the Bitch from Redmond) because they don't even know that there are alternatives.

I'm stil wai[tt]ing for someone to bother giving a valid definition of "computer literacy". People go on and on about how much more important it is today, and how it will be essential tomorrow.

Reminds me of the history of cars. When they first came out, you brought your own mechanic with you. If they had stayed the same way, nobody would bother with them - a horse is better.

If you still need "training" to do basic shit with a computer, then the problem is with the box and the user accpting such a situation.

There is no more need for "computer literacy" for most people than there is to bring your own mechanic when driving your car.

The PC isn't dead - but most users (who think they are "computer literate" because they can type a letter using a "word processor") are.

A lot of these same people STILL press enter when they type, and the letters get "too close to the right side of the window". They don't even know WTF word wrap is. This is NOT an improvement over the "bad old days of DOS".

There's a reason why they'll still be called "lusers" in 2015.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[timeOday]

Could you please elaborate on how you got remote sound?

Well, that's the problem, I don't. There are such things as "sound servers," but getting decent performance sending sound effects and music would require careful integration with applications.

mp3's, for instance, should be decoded client-side. Repetitive sounds (common in games) should only be sent once and referred to by some sort of handle afterwards. None of that is at all likely to be implemented, because it would require integration with every sound-producing application.

The only practical solution is "mega bandwidth" - decoding sounds on the server and sending them to the client. But a slow laptop on 802.11b does not have mega bandwidth. Depending on how much the network card's firmware does for you, (i.e. encryption), just receiving the data uses up a major chunk of your thin client.

The problem with a thin client that "just presents the user interface" is that these days most of the heavy lifting is the user interface!

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

but visicalc ran on servers, too!

the reason was: you didnt have to have big iron to run anything, and a small office of 10-20 people could justify the cost of a PC or two.

plus, you didnt need that huge overhead of staff.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

you could probably have checkers on them, but the computational resources of chess would be wayyyy too much.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm impressed by your restraint. Not many people could have answered a question like that without using the word "kid".

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[oliphaunt]

Clearcube does this now. They've been doing it for years. They're getting a lot of traction lately because of HIPAA. It's much easier to ensure HIPAA compliance when your computer terminals in a public space don't have any local data storage hardware or active USB ports.

the thing that prevents Clearcube from rolling it to a home use environment is that the break-even point for when it's cost effective to buy a rack and infrastrucuture to support the headless servers in the back room ends up being equal to the cost of eight or ten brand new standalone PC's... and I don't know how many family members with laptops YOU have, but I don't know anyone who has eight state-of-the-art PC's in their home.

disclaimer: I have at least six or seven PC's at home now, but one of them is a P3600, one is a Toshiba Pentium Pro laptop, one is my wife's work laptop... etc etc etc.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres an easy way to solve this although its not cheap...

Load up XP sessions on VMWare ESX, combined with a SAN,VMotion, and Veritas Clustering... High availiblity easy managed XP clients...

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[syousef]

Now I am still trying to understand why the cashier at walmart needs a full fledged PC, just to sell me my stuff.

This is all well and good but has anyone ever heard of the Universal Turing Machine? A general purpose programable machine is much better for writing software on. The more capability a particular architecture has, the wider a range of purposes it can be used for.

Why not just use a full fledged PC? If you don't need all the power, that's fine get a lower spec'd model. It would be cheaper than having specifically designed underpowered thin clients.

I'll tell you why not. The problem isn't in overpowered hardware. It's in overcomplexity and bloat of the basic operating software.

The operating systems now demand ridiculous specs just to run. The software aritecture isn't modular enough, and doesn't allow for scaling. The manufacturers use this as an excuse to sell you the next generation of hardware, which gives the sofware manufacturers an excuse to charge you for the next generation of software.

What can an end user honestly do today in a typical office environment with a computer that they couldn't do 5 years ago? So why can't you pick up a brand new computer with 5 year old specs for a lot less money?

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[SA Stevens]

I think his point was that it's easier to keep 48 of the machines up and running than one server.

Single-point-of-failure solutions are bad. Shutting down a whole office because the server is out is far worse than having lazy PC Tech service the one or two single-user machine outages that happen from time to time.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[SA Stevens]

A bunch of single processer machines, each with its own board, memory, IO, fans, footprint and power supply (w/ AC-DC transformer) is neccessarily more "wasteful" in terms of resources than a WTS running on an SMP machine.

I think you've forgotten that the single-user workstation has exactly the same set of hardware in it as the 'terminal' except the 'terminal' doesn't have a hard drive.

Businesses don't buy 'whitebox' systems and plug all the parts together themselves. Their 'full workstation' system is an integrated whole from a single vendor, just like a terminal is, but minus the fact that the terminal is dependent on a server staying up and responsive.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[SA Stevens]

If you have one 10-user machine that has 1 hour of downtime per year, and 10 1-user machines that have 1 hour of downtime per year, you have, in both cases, 10 man-hours of downtime.

When a 10 user department is completely unable to do their work it's considered far more serious than one or two machines in the workgroup being down.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Belanth]

From my experience working a call center, it seems that the greatest problem involved is site bandwidth. Where I worked, we used thick clients that connected with Citrix to a main server that handled all the actual account manipulations. Our computers were relatively low-spec for the job, and definitely underpowered for the supervisors - but the greatest problem I saw was network bottlenecks caused serious delays in recieving info from the account server - which was the primary system we needed. Unless Gigabit ethernet becomes as commonplace as 10baseT, thin clients simply don't have a efficient method of working in large groups.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Rockin' Az]

And with thin clients 50 users can go home and have some unplanned free time if the server takes an unexpected timeout...


Which isn't all that different for a lot of organisations with workstations. Where I am - everything goes on the network. While I can save on the local drive, for all practical purposes if the main server goes down I can't access any of my work/templates/records etc etc. For all intents and purposes I can do bugger all.

For orgs with document management systems there is certainly no difference between having workstations and thin clients. If the main server is down, you can't do anything document related. In one govt org I deal with there is no point in saving to your local drive, as the system is such that you effectively have to redo the document into the DMS.

Yeah - lose a server with thin clients and you get to go home early - but the same can also be true for workstations.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[SA Stevens]

The 'PC Revolution' in business took place in spite of the IT Goons of the time. The IT people had their mainframe, and issued greenscreens and account to a few select people. If a manager needed a report, he filled out a form, put in on the ledge of the half-door (the door to the 'glass room' where he wasn't allowed to enter) and hoped there would be a big 4" thick printout on greenbar paper for him by the time he needed the data.

Business got a big boost in productivity when the 'priesthood' of IT was taken down a bunch of notches. The first PCs inside many companies were bought by maverick managers and execs who totally circumvented the draconian 'IT Policy' and the white-coats in IT.

These early machines weren't even networked. This was the era of sneakernet, which evolved into the Zip-drive sneakernet, etc. The Networking of the PCs in many businesses came much later.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[SA Stevens]

Also, the mainframe word processor kinda sucked.

Tell me about it! I remember the groan of dismay that would cascade through the cubicle farm when the mini crashed and everybody lost everything they were working on at the time.

MIS guys like central control, though.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[SA Stevens]

Well, since the $500 SCSI drive has 148 people hitting on it steady 8 hours a day, we might have a draw.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[McDutchie]

Reminds me of the history of cars. When they first came out, you brought your own mechanic with you. If they had stayed the same way, nobody would bother with them - a horse is better.

If you still need "training" to do basic shit with a computer, then the problem is with the box and the user accpting such a situation.

Are you implying by contrast that you don't need "training" to do "basic shit" with a car? Gee, I'm sure glad I don't have to be your passenger.

I, for one, favor the introduction of an Internet driver's license so that all those zombie PC's will stop flooding my mailbox with spam and viruses.

No matter how smart you make the boxen, you can never keep up with end-user stupidity. The problem is that, otherwise than with cars, we live in a computer culture in which end-users are not encouraged to take responsibility for their own stupidity.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[eno2001]

That's my point though... It was CHEAPER for me to put the money into the backend system back in 1997 ($2000) and then over time buy the two $150 laptops as terminals. For a total cost of about $2300 over eight years, I have a system that has been perfectly usable over that entire time. Granted, when I first bought it, I did use it as a PC an then I got wise and moved to the thin client model. That average family plunks down about $800-1000 on a mid-range PC every two to three years when they find out that the latest app they want won't run on their current system.

I will admit that I'm not a typical example of the average user, but there is no reason this stuff can't be prepackaged and managed by a service provider on an upgrade basis. But I do agree with one thing that the poster I originally replied to said. If you are into serious computer power, thin client computing probably won't work. I will also say that those who need a lot of power are rare...

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[g0_p]

I work in an office on thin clients. In the past couple of years, there have been maybe 2-3 occassions at most when I have had these unexpected timeouts. And its way less headache than having your own system. Sure I dont get to install cool apps, but then as an office machine I suppose that is the right way to go.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Rockin' Az]

I did something similar for my wife and I. Our setup was quite simple - Mandrake 8.x with LTSP running on a Celeron 333 with 384MB RAM as the server (and workstation) and a P133 as a client. With that setup we could run very comfortably -

KDE (two sessions)
StarOffice 5.2
Netscape 6
a Win4Lin session (wife) running Word 97, Excel 97 and IE.

That setup ran remarkably smoothly with the only the occasional delay if we were both trying to start an app at the same time. The two machines were connected with standard 100 ethernet.

Obviously this setup wouldn't scale to many more than two users and is not suited to a corporate environment, but it does show that modern hardware is far more powerful than necessary IN SOME CIRCUMSTANCES.

Do we still use the same setup? No - the motherboard of the server got messed up by a power surge and I decided I wanted a Powerbook.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Billly Gates]

I thought thin clients were cheaper?

MS back in 99 just changed the EULA for WIndows and OFFICE to make using Terminal server more expensive soley to claim "pc's are cheaper". Kind of slimy if you ask me.

If I recall before the rise of Linux, ms new enemy after netscape became network computers. Obviously MS wants revenue from every user to satisfy shareholder demands.

Clearly if we were not so dependant on MS software the corps would be using terminals or just really thin clients again like in the 70's and 80's with terminals. Pc's are complex today which is why the trend to reverse is there.

Isn't Dell working or researching on a mini-server that houses 4-5 monitors and keyboards for that reason? I would not be surprised if blade computers being shared becomes the next big thing in the office. That is unless MS changes their EULA's to make them more expensive then hav ing individual pc's/.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Xyrus]

"But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor."

"Why would anyone need more than 640K?"

There seems to be a popular misconception on slashdot the averag Joe Beermaster doesn't use the computer for anything more than some email, word processing, a surfing.

It's been my experience that people are beginning to catch up with the technology. There are those of us who are ahead of the curve (nerds like us), those in the middle of the curve (mostly the up and coming generation and anyone who's around computers enough), and people below the curve (the horror stories of tech support).

I see a lot more people using digital cameras and digital video cameras and processing them on their PC's. I see a lot of people playing intense 3D games. I see a lot of people doing audio processing.

This takes up lots of space and lots of processing power.

I disagree with both you and Carr. As time goes along, people are becoming less afraid and more confident in their computer use. With confidence comes more exploration and more discovery. The curve moves forward.

Once people learn the potential of what computers are capable of, we'll probably see another surge of higher end computer buying/using.

I view the current situation as one that has happened many times in the past. Society and people change more slowly than technology, but they'll eventually catch up.

~X~

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Billly Gates]

I was thinking of the opposite with ISP's using Avalon and webservices for renting applications.

MS wants to use IE as teh new mechanism for software subscriptions including office and .NET.

A cheap console like device with some storage locally but most on an ISP would make sense. I imagine a Tivo like device which would be a smart terminal or thin client. You can see the trend?

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Fjornir]

Agreed, but for the record: boot from the NIC and you get much much much of the thin client manageability back. :)

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

maybe you've missed my ranting on this thread, but net booting sucks.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Fjornir]

I caught it further down in the thread and actually asked you for some explanation of why you think that. My experiences have been nothing but positive.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[The Archon V2.0]

Now I am still trying to understand why the cashier at walmart needs a full fledged PC, just to sell me my stuff.

Or any call center agent....

As a former call center agent, all I can say is that we needed full-fledged PCs to keep sane. Believe me, even the most dedicated agent hunts down and fires up Freecell in hour 2 of a call that goes through a translator or one where you hear the phrase "And they told me I'd never be able to upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 98! So what if it takes ten minutes to boot?" (Unless you're a hose-and-close master, then you keep Freecell open all the time.)

More serious answer: Some of the apps Big Companies use are positively ancient, and hip-deep in Wintel-specific cruft. (My favorite: A Win2K box running a "Made for Windows 95" app that called a DOS program during some parts of its operation.) Therefore, any call center that does outsourcing (i.e. not owned and run by whoever you're calling) HAS to have PCs.

In an outsourced call center, agents can walk in on Wednesday to find out that their section got re-zoned Tuesday night for political reasons and they now work on the other end of the building. Re-imaging 100 PCs isn't a pleasant task, but it's far easier than carting 100 thin clients to one of the building and dragging the 100 PCs they replaced back to where the thin clients used to be.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Naah. No Joe sixpack user is going to be happy with a thin client solution. The numbers are not as big as a PC. Hell, the users don't know exactly what these numbers mean, but they are bigger and therefore "more powerful"

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why thin is out, utility computing is in. See Softricity's SoftGrid environment, which can run conflicting apps on the same machine. The apps stream to the client in their own environment (file system and Registry), and they start up in many cases faster than a locally-installed app would (once it's in the cache, of course).

And there's a "disconnected operation" mode, where the server can go away (or, more likely, the laptop can go on the road) and the apps are still available for a(n IT-configurable) number of days.

Since the app streams to the client, each server can support thousands of users instead of Citrix's 50 or so. A thin client model works great when the clients are "dumb" Windows terminals, but companies aren't buying them because as was pointed out here, full-blown computers cost the same or less and are more flexible, so are better value. Thin-client in that environment means the extra processor, disk, and RAM go to waste since the apps are running on the server. Whereas with SoftGrid, the apps run on the client, which helps make better use of the entire IT investment.

It also works in conjunction with a Citrix environment. The Citrix server is the SoftGrid client, so it becomes [tt]hree-tiered. SoftGrid makes it easy to migrate (and add) Citrix servers with minimal administration, and if the application needs to be "reinstalled" the literal click of a button (and a confirmation dialog, so 2 clicks total) will clear the application from the cache, so the next time it is run it will start up slightly slower but will be fresh again. And terminal server administrators generally preload the cache on the servers, so no user experiences the initial load delay.

There is a lot more to it, and yes I am not entirely impartial. Check out the Flash demo on the site, it does a better job of explaining the platform and how it all works than I can.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Thing 1]

You know (OT), I've been wondering about solving chess. Once we have enough machines in distributed.net (or whatever the fashion is tehse days), we can just approach it brute-force:

Number the pieces 1-16 (for one side). Move piece 1. Send that board to the grid. Move piece 1 back to start and a different place, if possible. If not, move piece 2, and send new board to the grid. Keep repeating, spawning new threads, until that board is done, then reconnect to the grid as a slave.

Each of the other slaves will do the same for moves on the opponent's side.

Obviously, this is a large search space, and quantum computers would probably be required to finish the job. But the twist is this: once we've calculated all of the possible games, we work our way back from the games we'd lose in, and just not choose whatever move we chose last to end up in that particular checkmate. Keep working our way up if that was the only move, of course, until we've pruned away probably 75% or so of the total area. Then we have an unbeatable chess game, which also reacts lightning fast.

Of course, it might be several terabytes in size, so wouldn't easily install on the home machine (yet).

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[Ogerman]

I've done netboot installs with over 7000 seats, in 500+ geographic locations..

Wow.. I've certainly never done anything that large. My experience was more on a "workgroup" scale.. 20-40 boxes. So I don't doubt you ran into quite a bit more difficulty! Did any particular thing get in the way of smooth operation? What technologies were used?

The point of the removable storage with local apps is to mitigate the "but i cant work if the server is down" problem.

Hmm.. what about replicated servers to spread the load and reduce the effect of an outage? Then have some hot backups ready to swap in if needed..

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[SgtChaireBourne]

Have you ever worked in a Citrix environment?

No, but we once tried to for nearly a year and a half. Basically, it was down whenever it was needed and took days to get the Windows admin off his fat ass and do whatever it was that was needed to get it online again. We eventually did without.

It was a real clash of cultures. All the MS idiots spent their time trying to convince our department that downtime was both normal and acceptable. Everyone else who had been using computers since before the dot-com scam knew otherwise and we had around 25 linux/unix servers worth of stats to prove uptime was still possible.

The ironic part was that some geographically distant and intellectually stunted managment seemed to think that there was some magic on the windows servers that would increase productivity. That is, despite the inability for Citrix, MS-Exchange or MS-2000 server (or what it was called) to stay up for more than two or three days.

MS-Exchange itself caused lost deals to the tune of millions by 1) delaying some percentage of mail for hours, thus preventing dialog, 2) losing some mail completely with no message or warning, 3) producing false 'user-does-not-exist' messsages resulting in delay/loss of contact with new partners/potential clients

The PC is not dead, but Windows and, by association, Microsoft, is.

Have you ever experienced using a thin-client for the course of a year or more?

Yes, but not as a main workstation and not Windows based. The Linux Terminal Server Project does a good job for a good price.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[wwest4]

Like I said earlier, it depends on your environment; there is no single solution. When continuous availability actually matters (client order fulfillment, for example), I agree 100% that 1 egg basket is a bad idea. However, there are many places where this is not as strict a requirement (research, engineering, long-term projects), so it still makes sense. Where it is a requirement, Terminal Servers can still work, but the minimum headcount is higher.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[FatherOfONe]

I agree that some call centers use old windows programs. However, any new call center should be shot if they design an application that isn't web based. Even a screen pop shouldn't be tied to Windows.

I think you miss the point of an NC or very thin client. In your example, the only thing that would have to happen is that you would move to a different terminal and log in. Your email, desktop and roles would follow you. Yes Windows "can" do that but the overhead is far larger and complex than a thin client setup. Another issue is the ability to "push" new software to a call center is more complex in a Windows environment (even with Wininstall) than a centrally managed/controlled environment.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[virtual_mps]

When a 10 user department is completely unable to do their work it's considered far more serious than one or two machines in the workgroup being down.

That's a fairly specious argument these days. The reality is that a whole lotta people depend on network resources even if they don't have a thin client, to the extent that their desktop is basically unusable if the remote resources are unavailable. (E.g., file server.) Replacing a thin client with thick clients doesn't eliminate a single point of failure, it simply increases the number of single points of failure.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[JWW]

Thats why servers are bulit with redundancy, so that one component can fail and not take down the entire server. I know, some components can't be redundant, but then you can have redundant servers. It is a lot easier to keep 1 of 2 servers running than all 50 client PCs.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[tomhudson]

I, for one, favor the introduction of an Internet driver's license so that all those zombie PC's will stop flooding my mailbox with spam and viruses.

And just how do you think that's going to stop people with zombie PCs when many of the security problems are related to flaws in the OS?

Doesn't work, any more than taking a drivers' course makes people better drivers. It just gives them the right to be assholes on the road.

Are you implying by contrast that you don't need "training" to do "basic shit" with a car? Gee, I'm sure glad I don't have to be your passenger.

If I give you a car in the middle of a field, along with 5 minutes of basic instruction, you should be able to drive it. How do you think farm kids do it with combines, tractors, pickups, etc?

When I bought my first 4x4, (Ford F250 - that was my first "car" actually), the dealer asked if I was familiar with the handling characteristics of 4x4s. I said, "Hell, no, I've never even driven a standard on the road, never mind a 4x4. Just got my drivers' license." So I screwed the plates on, drove across 8 lanes of traffic and one to my insurance to pick up my policy.

When I bought my first back-hoe (Case 580), had the dealer deliver it - he asked me if I was familiar with that model. I said "never driven a backhoe before in my life. Just show me where the forward, reverse, and bucket controls are and skat, 'cause I start work as soon as you get it off the flatbed". Again, no problem.

When I bought my grader, I had the dealer deliver it, because I had never driven one. When it came time to work with it, it was no big deal.

First time I had to drive a bulldozer (a Cat D9) I had to ask the guy "where's the starter switch?" "Drop your right hand by your side. Look down. It's right there." Started it up, then proceeded to have some fun.

Got my hands on a Cat 966 loader at the same place - used it to bury a car that someone insisted on leaving in the parking lot every day. (sometimes size does count).

Bought a motorcycle - didn't even try it before buying it - never driven one before. Took it into a parking lot to play with for 5 minutes, then into rush-hour traffic across a jam-packed bridge. No problemo.

Let's see what else we can add - the dump trucks were fun, the snow plows, the asphalt roller, - oh almost forgot - cars. Lots of cars.

Driving isn't that hard - any kid can do it with a bit of practice.

And, before you ask, I've been accident-free all that time (30 years and at least a million miles), so statistically, you're safer with me as a driver than with pretty much anyone else.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[SA Stevens]

A 'single point of failure' for a single employee is nowhere near as severe as a 'single point of failure' for an entire department.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[SA Stevens]

But it's a lot easier to keep a company productive if there are 48 out of 50 personal workstations up and running than if all 50 people are debilitated because the App Server is down.

This, in spite of the way so many IT people are chiming in about it, is MORE than an IT issue. It is NOT about what makes life easier for the IT Staff.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[JWW]

But the answer's simple. The App Server can't be down. There are things you can do that can make you 99.99% sure (or more) that that is the case.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[TemporalBeing]

"Administration is where it makes sense, but I still think thin client is a step backward." Agreed, but a few points. "A full-powered workstation is *cheaper* than a thin client." Well...as others have pointed out, this really depends on the factors considered. To purchase the systems, it is likely possible to be cheaper, but to run (power, etc.) and maintain the systems, it is not. Some of those costs cannot be helped even with thin-clients - you still have to power a monitor, and keyboard; although it will be cheaper than running a P4 under the desk. However, I think that is really where we need to consider what is necessary. Is it necessary for every office worker to be running a 3.6GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM? Or rather should software programmers do their job and write applications just as tight as they use to? There is no reason why a word processor (e.g. Microsoft Word) should require a PII (even a Pentium) system to operate. Or why a web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) should either. There is no reason why the operating system should either. And this is probably one of the more advantageous points about Open Source - the software has the potential and ability (in most cases) to run on even an i386. So, perhaps what really needs to be done is that software needs to become better written and be able to run on more versions of the architecture (from the i386 to the P4 IA32e), and not be so consuming of the resources that it can do so; and then instead of buying the big computers to operate the entire organization, utilize the corporate network (the intranet of the company) as a super computer, much like SetiOnline and similar programs do. That is where savings will come from, since you will no longer need to keep as many servers around, and the servers you do have will be more able to do their job (file management, authentication, DHCP, DNS, etc.). This will not only lower the power of the computers, but also make the usage of the computers (and their depreciation cost) last longer. So, companies would be able to bring back the i486 as the company standard, or use the P4 3.6 GHz for the next 15 years. Replacement costs will go down, and users will actually be more productive since they won't be waiting on the computer so much. Unfortunately, this will not likely happen in the commercial computer industry since that would mean that people don't have to buy the latest and greatest computer, and they may not need that upgrade except to get a few bug fixes. Yet another reason why F/OSS will win in the end (mainly b/c F/OSS programmers tend to keep older systems around). FYI - I am a programmer. Oh, and I actually feel more productive on my PII 233 than on my Pentium M 1.4 GHz. The applications are just more responsive.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[The Archon V2.0]

I think you miss the point of an NC or very thin client. In your example, the only thing that would have to happen is that you would move to a different terminal and log in.

If the whole system is homogenous and of recent design, yes. Moving is as easy as logging onto a different box. But that requires a system entirely of thin clients, and that's impossible in most call centers. A call center needs to be able to handle the introduction of arbitrary third-party applications built on the Wintel standard, something thin clients can't do.

Maintaining a mix of thin and standard clients is a nightmare, for the reason I mentioned (I likely should've outlined the scenario a bit more). You're running two networks, constantly shuffling hardware, and losing more money than the thin machines theoretically saved.

The only option left is to buy a ton of IBM Aptivas or NetVistas or whatever they're calling them this year and use that. Contract X has all thin-client-friendly web apps? Well, we'll just increase their agent's security settings so there's less chance of them running something bad.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[danila]

sure, they will take off there - it's a cost thing

A low-end computer already costs around 200$. At this point it doesn't make much sense to try to save a hundred bucks per employee by going the thin-client route (and you will need expensive servers). As a matter of fact, you can get the best of both worlds by using Linux - use cheap PCs as thin clients, but know that the capacity for real computing is still in every machine whenether you want it.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[danila]

But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web?

You take the old tasks and the new technology. Of course, these don't match. The same would happen if you asked if the average office worker needed a 2MHz processor and a 1Mb hard drive in 1970 to dictate letters to his secretary, make phone calls through the exchange and read newspapers.

The point is that new technology can be used to work better. If some business hasn't yet found a use for a 3GHz processor, it doesn't logically follow that 3GHz processors are useless for that company, it follows that that company lacks insight and foresight, and is essentially blind. The same can be said about software developers that haven't yet offered products that take advantage of that immense number-crunching power. I'm talking about your company, Bill...

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[FatherOfONe]

My point is that you switch the entire call center over to thin clients. First you switch all the applications to web based (and java), then "if" you need to use a PC you can with little effort. However there should be little to no need to switch to a place with a PC. Every call center I have seen has the agents located in one core area or areas. Moving them around is not that big of an issue.

The other bad side of using PC's is that you have to build an "image" of a PC for the call center. So in your example if someone switched to a new area and that area didn't have the call center apps loaded, I.T. would have to use something like WinInstall to push or pull the software down to the client. Ahhh but that software was tested on the callcenter imgage, and thus may not work on a non callcenter PC. It is a freaking nightmare to support. So what most PC call centers do is try and make every call center machine as similar as possible and then lock it down very tight.

In the end you end up making a PC nothing more than a thin client (roaming profiles, extreme security profiles etc) and gaining none of the advantages the PC gives except possibly that you get to purchase one common hardware platform.

So in my scenario, you would have a call center with thin clients (heck citrix boxes in the worst case), in the call center. Any agent could move with little to no effort anywhere in the call center. If for some extreme reason they need to move to an area with PC's they could, and then just use the PC's browser to access their applications.

Re:Maybe next year, eh?

[virtual_mps]

A 'single point of failure' for a single employee is nowhere near as severe as a 'single point of failure' for an entire department.

You continue to miss the point. It's no better for the departmental file server to be down than for the depmartmental thin client server to be down. Any reasonably well managed organization (one that has centralized resources for better workflow) already has things that absolutely need to be up. Thin clients are just one more, no big deal.

no shit sherlock?

[gl4ss]

stupid question to ask at this point anyways.

just about as much value as asking..
is the car dead????? no.
is the bolt action rifle dead? no.
is pizza dead? no.

all might be true at some point in the future..

Re:no shit sherlock?

[WIAKywbfatw]

Pizza isn't dead yet but it's only a matter of time. Didn't you see Demolition Man?

Re:no shit sherlock?

[tomhudson]

is pizza dead? no.

all might be true at some point in the future..

Never! Heresy! BTW, some guy named Guido wants to talk to you out back ...

The PC isn;t dead, just that so many ar filled with spyware, worms, virii and other crap that it might be more merciful and productive to give many users a "dumb terminal", or at least a web-based app that can emulate the functionality of one.

Re:no shit sherlock?

[Kenja]

If anything the pizzia I got last week is now more alive then ever!

Re:no shit sherlock?

[ssj_195]

...and toilet paper won't be far behind...

Re:no shit sherlock?

[cmdr_beeftaco]

is Steven King dead? depends who you ask.

Yawn

[MoxCamel]

Bill Gates says PC isn't dead. In other news, freedom is on the march, and be sure to get your free iPod.

Wake me when Bill Gates runs Linux on his Mac.

Mox

Re:Yawn

[pla]

Wake me when Bill Gates runs Linux on his Mac.

Yeah, some mornings I'd like to sleep forever as well. So wake me when OS-X runs on PC hardware.


IPod... Heh, how cute. Must... not... mention... Vorbis!

Re:Yawn

[justforaday]

Freedom is on the march? Says who? Name your sources, please...

Re:Yawn

[jaavaaguru]

You do realise that if that *ever* happens, it'll cost more than the Mac version. It would probably be cheaper overall to buy a Mac Mini.

Re:Yawn

[argent]

Wake me when Bill Gates runs Linux on his Mac.

Bill Gates runs Tru64 on his Alphaserver.

Apparently some DEC guys presented him with an Alphaserver running a DECsystem emulator that had Bill Gates' old TOPS account from when he was developing MASM on the DECsystem... Under the emulator, it's running Digital UNIX/Tru64.

Re:Yawn

[syrinx]

Must... not... mention... Vorbis!

You might as well -- certainly no one else will.

Linux!

[redelm]

Of course "the most revolutionary years are yet to come". MS will be deposed!

If you're running windows

[Anonymous Coward]

.....It will probably kill it.

semantics really

[Anonymous Coward]

Does a zombie PC count as alive? Can anyone confirm/deny?

Re:semantics really

[varmittang]

Remember, kill the original zombie, and everyone who is a zombie returns to normal. So if you kill the head PC zombie (the hacker), then all zombie PCs will be back to being normal PCs. Until they get bit again.

Re:semantics really

[smackjer]

Well, they're "undead", which technically means "not dead". So Bill is right!

Re:semantics really

[Anonymous Coward]

Your thinking vampires

Re:semantics really

[ArsonSmith]

Yea, so what ever you do don't start chopping zombie's heads of left and right.

Re:semantics really

[jaavaaguru]

Netcraft confirms it!

Re:semantics really

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft Confirms it: ZombiePCs really are alive.

PC is dead

[BigHungryJoe]

Java thin clients are where it's at. Sun has known this for years, and that's why they are doing so well in the market.

Re:PC is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright moderaters. This guy is trying to be funny

Re:PC is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and Oracle's stock price just jumped 200% thanks to Larry's Network Computing vision.

Re:PC is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

> Java thin clients are where it's at.

I disagree. We will see in the short .net CLR virtual clients.

We will also see virtualization of the entire machine at the corporate level in the next few years.

A trimmed down MS windows XP derivative bootable from internal flash memory card OS will eventually be the default.

Re:PC is dead

[delirium of disorder]

Mod it funny if you want, but Sun thin clients probably offer the best price/performance ratio of any setup out there for an office environment. I know of one network (one of the largest corporate law firms in the world) where every user has a PIV desktop that just runs the Citrix ICA client. It is locked down so user's cannot acces any local applications, just boot windows 2000 and run Citrix. All these PCs are a waste of money! A Sun ray thin client would be a great replacement, and could allow every user to upgrade their environment simply by upgrading the Citrix or Sun Ray server, and allow every user to cary the same session to any computer they work at (authenticate via smart card and username/password). It would also allow seamless intigration of remotly accessable apps running on Linux, Solaris, or another version of Linux. Sun thin client laptop's with wifi are also a pritty cool solution. They are finally available for under a grand. Check it out: http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/html/products/mobil e/comet/

Re:PC is dead

[g3000]

The PC is *not* dead. But he is infected with a number of viruses and not doing entirely well.

Re:PC is dead

[Ogerman]

We will see in the short .net CLR virtual clients.

Right idea.. wrong platform, wrong standards. We'll see diskless workstations that network boot Linux/BSD/whatever and are used primarily to run a somewhat evolved Mozilla or Konqueror web browser supporting SVG, CSS3, XForms, etc. Most business apps will use rich-web, standards-compliant interfaces that feel no different than native clients -- except that they will be much better integrated than anything we've seen up to this point. Office suites will have been obsoleted by web-based document management systems, a component of said integrated business apps. Native apps will still be used as needed.. graphics, multimedia, etc. But they'll all be Open Source and loaded from the network. Every workstation in the office will have a complete and uniform collection of software available. (Unlike today where employees must usually beg for a copy of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.)

Re:PC is dead

[gklnx]

Mod it funny if you want, but Sun thin clients probably offer the best price/performance ratio of any setup out there for an office environment.

Mac mini better

Im cynical.

[DeathByDuke]

'Is the PC dead?' asked the reporter.

'No!' says the man who once said we all need only 640kbytes of memory...

Re:Im cynical.

[Trolling4Columbine]

You must be referring to somebody else, because Bill Gates never said that.

In response to this article

[Danimoth]

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan 2005/tc20050119_5359.htm Its an editorial piece in which the author basicly states that the PC has hit its peak.

Re:In response to this article

[klugerama]

Hmm. I'd be concerned about a physician that would recommend phone numbers for funeral homes after telling me I've reached my peak.

This reminds me of the old joke that says something about all the money out there that Bill Gates doesn't have yet.

I kind of doubt the PC has peaked yet...there are still billions of people who don't have one, almost entirely because they can't afford it or think they don't need it, but the ceiling has been dropping for years. It will soon come to a point when affordability of a PC will be compared (at least on the level of necessity) to that of a home, car, or even clothes.

Re:In response to this article

[JohnTheFisherman]

So, according to the author....the corporate IT departments, who allegedly can't manage, protect, and maintain corporate PCs and user data, are going to be able to set up a productive mainframe and thin clients that rely entirely on them?

That sounds a little scary.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

According to mc chris, "PCs are lame".

I recommend slashdot host a discussion panel, mc chris on one side, Bill Gates on the other.

Re:zerg

[gl4ss]

has little to do with the point under discussion though, because macs are PERSONAL COMPUTERS just as well, which is the thing that PC in a question like this represents.

were the pc dead then apple would have to start scrambling on to thin clients or whatever..

Re:zerg

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be a debate, not a discussion, you fool.

Re:zerg

[Koiu Lpoi]

Why DO you title all your posts 'zerg'? Recognition thing? Or some deeper meaning I don't understand?

Re:zerg

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, what Bill Gates seems to forget is that most people can play Solitaire with a deck of cards.

Re:zerg

[lawpoop]

I prefer instead a rap battle.

Re:zerg

[Anonymous Coward]

http://images.google.com/images?q=zerg&hl=en&lr=&c lient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa= N&tab=wi
HTH HAND.

Ah..billy billy billy...

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.

Take the trojans, spyware, and spam out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.

(Especially true for M$!)

That's funny.

[bigtallmofo]

When they asked the richest man in the world, who happened to have amassed his wealth in the PC business what he thought about the PC business, he had nothing but positive things to say.

Re:That's funny.

[twifosp]

Yes, sor?

He amassed his weatlh in the PC business. One might say that's a measurement of success. One might also say that such a successful person is qualified to speak about it more so than a random journalist. If he says positive things about it, where's your pile of cash that qualifies you to argue about it?

Now granted, I'll immediately concede that most of Microsoft's success comes from less than ethical business practices and marketing, rather than technology innovation.

I'd also admit that I detect a bit of underhanded marketing any time Bill Gates says ANYTHING about the computer industry.

Having said that, I'd still take his opinion over some cynical slashdot poster or ill-informed journalist about the computer industry.

Questionable quality and poor business practices aside... they are managing to sell a lot of stuff to a lot of people without the use of gun point. Though, they do buy and stop the sale of a lot of things at legal gun point.

Oh, who am I kidding with this post. Sorry, I'll revert. MICROSOFT BAD! BILL GATES ARE EVIL! BRAINS!!!!

Re:That's funny.

[Mac Mini Enthusiast]

When they asked the richest man in the world, who happened to have amassed his wealth in the PC business what he thought about the PC business, he had nothing but positive things to say.

Not just that, but most of Billy's wealth is still amassed as stock shares, which is potential wealth. Ie, that wealth isn't really his yet. So if he ever says anything disparaging against Microsoft he'll LOSE a truckload of money if the share price goes down.

That's why I really don't understand why investors take the word of company executives seriously, the executives are merely trying to keep their stock prices high.

It also seems somewhat wrong to let Gates write journalism columns anyway, because of the above conflict of interest. It's more-or-less giving Microsoft free advertising space (Or - can anyone point out any message where Gates actually said something worthwhile and also negative about Microsoft?). While I'm sure many journalists own certain stocks themselves, Billy is in a whole different class. He owns enough stock to buy several small nations, so giving him a platform in a supposedly neutral magazine to advertise just doesn't seem proper.

Re:That's funny.

[hoggoth]

> Oh, who am I kidding with this post. Sorry, I'll revert. MICROSOFT BAD! BILL GATES ARE EVIL! BRAINS!!!!

That was pretty good. You had me there for a while. Then I realized it was the evil twin of 'Twifosp' from an alternate dimension.

I should have known from the evil-goatee beard you were wearing while you typed.

Re:That's funny.

[macrom]

In other news, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud announced that oil other petroleum products were excellent sources of clean energy, with no need to search for alternative fuel and energy sources for the next 10 years.

Re:That's funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I generally agree, he's not the richest. The guy who owns (all? most?) of IKEA is.

Re:That's funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another example of how people will buy any old crap.

Re:That's funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

where's your pile of cash that qualifies you to argue about it?

Ask Ghandi.

Re:That's funny.

[techno-vampire]

So if he ever says anything disparaging against Microsoft he'll LOSE a truckload of money if the share price goes down.

But he'll still be rich. No matter what happens to Microsoft, he'll be rich. He doesn't have to boost his company to protect his investment anymore. I think that, in this at least, we can trust him to be saying what he really believes is true. Business doesn't stay profitable when it turns its back on technology it's already adopted, and that's what they'd have to do to get rid of their desktop computers. It just isn't going to happen.

Re:That's funny.

[argent]

If he says positive things about it, where's your pile of cash that qualifies you to argue about it?

You mean this money I spent on college was wasted? I should have just sat on it 'cos it's the money that matters... not what you do with it?

Re:That's funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, hey, feel free to stop being such a pompous ass at any time.

Re:That's funny.

[Moofie]

"I think that, in this at least, we can trust him to be saying what he really believes is true."

So what? If I believe in the tooth fairy, and I tell you that tooth fairies are good, is that information at all relevant to you?

You can trust Bill Gates to work only in his own interest. Just because he's rich doesn't make him more honest, or wise. He was just more conniving than the next guy.

Re:That's funny.

[deacon]

He amassed his weatlh in the PC business. One might say that's a measurement of success. One might also say that such a successful person is qualified to speak about it more so than a random journalist. If he says positive things about it, where's your pile of cash that qualifies you to argue about it?

You make a classic mistake when you assume that what Bill says for publication is necessarily what he actually thinks. It has been known that people make statements in order to influence an outcome, not becuase they are sure that outcome will happen. In fact, if an outcome is certain, people usually don't bother to talk about it: How many "The sun rose today" conversations do you hear every morning?

As far as your "pile of cash" comment, do you remember someone called Ken Olsen?

Does the company name "Digital Equipment Corporation" ring a bell, anywhere? Ken had a modest pile of cash. He was a nice, personable guy to talk to, and he had an imposing presence. He drove a junker of a dark blue sub-compact ford? station wagon to work every day. Somehow, his cash, personality, and innate frugality that did not prevent the decline and fall of DEC.

Re:That's funny.

[twifosp]

Well, I'm suprised at the response to the post personally. It's aim was mostly sarcasm :D

You make a classic mistake when you assume that what Bill says for publication is necessarily what he actually thinks. It has been known that people make statements in order to influence an outcome, not becuase they are sure that outcome will happen. In fact, if an outcome is certain, people usually don't bother to talk about it: How many "The sun rose today" conversations do you hear every morning? Yup, partially the Hawthorne effect. Since when has this not been a part of American "capitalist" business anyway. Every CEO is made celebrity so they can speak publicly about their business. It's part of their job.

Whatever Bill Gates says publicaly or not, I would be willing to wager he has a better idea of what goes on in the PC world than you, I, the parent, or the person who wrote the article.

I personally detest him because of the business practices he lets happen in his company.

But back to your point. If a statement is designed to influence the outcome, and it does. Then I'd say the person making the statement has insight on the process, just by having the influence.

If power predicts, power dictates. They aren't mutually exclusive. For instance, if I tell you the sun will rise today, that doesn't mean I'm responsible for it. But then again, if someone who controls a sizable chunk of the PC industry "predicts" where the industry is going to go. It's quite possible it's because, that's where he's planning on taking it.

As far as your "pile of cash" comment, do you remember someone called Ken Olsen? Never heard of him. But I fail to see any statistical correlation.

Re:That's funny.

[Nikker]

Thats fine and all, now lets think about this for a second.

Lets just say for shits and giggles the whole world changes from individual boxes to basicaly a wireless keyboard/monitor/mouse. All the apps you can eat for one monthly fee. We would think Bill would charge a licencing fee per client to maximize his profits etc,etc.. Enter the world of thin clients.

Now lets say the company or group of, say screw M$ the developers will have to port because no one else has a CPU to run software. So they now have our buddy Bill G by the gonads.

Its much easier to divide an conquer in Bill's position because running diffrent OS's initally consumes much power(in terms of education, repair, etc) then levels off. So FUD is all he needs right now to fuel the machine.

While I know you are posting to contradict the "Slashdot extremeists" but by being one yourself you prove nothing but your own ignorance.

Re:That's funny.

[ChuckleBug]

Oh, who am I kidding with this post. Sorry, I'll revert. MICROSOFT BAD! BILL GATES ARE EVIL! BRAINS!!!!

I'm sorry to interrupt your knee-jerking session, but what the hell does this have to do with the post you replied to?

It has nothing at all to do with an opinion about BG. It's that he has a CONFLICT OF INTEREST. It's like asking Steve Jobs to write about the usefulness of an iPod. Not objective, see?

A thought occurs: If you want to flame people who bash Gates, that's cool, but how about saving it for someone who actually did bash Gates?

Re:That's funny.

[twifosp]

That's ridiculas. And when did I bash anyone for bashing Bill Gates? Sounds like you misinterpreted something.

If you ask only unbiased people who have no vested interest in a topic, you're going to get some pretty useless information.

I understand your point. That it's in Bill Gates best interest to paint a picture that will sell the most Microsoft products. But that doesn't mean he's not also qualified to speak on the subject.

It's kind of like saying you can't trust a professional mathematicians answer to a complex math problem, because he has a conflict of interest.

You can't be unbiased AND an expert at the same time. Any expert without real field time, is a self claimed expert. And anyone who chooses to take answers from an unqualified expert deserves what they get.

Bill Gates is an expert at what he does. Love him or hate him, it's undeniable that Microsoft's influence SHAPES events. Hopefully oneday, one of those events will include it's own undoing.

Despite all that, I find myself agreeing with your point. It's like saying since George W Bush is President of the United States, we shouldn't trust anything he says about the United States.

Damn... You're right.

Re:That's funny.

[ChuckleBug]

That's ridiculas.(sic) And when did I bash anyone for bashing Bill Gates? Sounds like you misinterpreted something.

Maybe. I saw a harangue about the definition of success capped off with a sarcastic mock that Gates is evil, etc. Sure looks like you were accusing him of Gates-hate.

If you ask only unbiased people who have no vested interest in a topic, you're going to get some pretty useless information.

I understand your point. That it's in Bill Gates best interest to paint a picture that will sell the most Microsoft products. But that doesn't mean he's not also qualified to speak on the subject.

Clearly, you are not understanding my point, because you extrapolate that I somewhere said he wasn't qualified to speak on the subject. I said he has a conflict of interest, which means he lacks objectivity. That doesn't mean he's not qualified to speak, it means his words are likely to be self-serving and should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Not only that, but that kind of conflict of interest is likely to result in a lot of safe feel-good talk. Did you read the article? Lots of words that say nothing at all, except that PCs are great.

It's kind of like saying you can't trust a professional mathematicians answer to a complex math problem, because he has a conflict of interest.

That is a horrendous analogy. Really. A better one would be asking a professional mathematician if professional mathematicians should all have their salaries doubled. Since there is in fact no conflict of interest in a mathematician answering questions about mathematics, I wouldn't say what you suggest.

You can't be unbiased AND an expert at the same time. Any expert without real field time, is a self claimed expert. And anyone who chooses to take answers from an unqualified expert deserves what they get.

That's fine, but it has nothing to do with anything I said. Nobody's asking for someone completely unbiased! I never even said such a person existed!

You have a very black or white view of this subject. People aren't either biased beyond hope or completely free of bias. There is a wide range of biases, and it's important to know what they are when evaluating what they say. Gates has a huge stake in people buying as many PCs as possible. He's conducting marketing in a piece like this, not offering any degree of objectivity.

Despite all that, I find myself agreeing with your point. It's like saying since George W Bush is President of the United States, we shouldn't trust anything he says about the United States.

Damn... You're right.

Thanks for agreeing, but you're agreeing with some half-baked analogy you made up, not "my point."

I don't trust anything Bush says about the effectiveness of his policies, because he's just a cheerleader for them, like Gates is for PCs. If Bush talked about how many people live in Oklahoma or where Yellowstone Park is, well, I wouldn't trust that either, but that's because he's an idiot, not because he has any reason to lie about that.

Re:That's funny.

[techno-vampire]

You can trust Bill Gates to work only in his own interest. Just because he's rich doesn't make him more honest, or wise.

In general, I agree with you. In this case, I can't see where he'd benefit by lying. No matter what happens to Microsoft, he'll always have more money than he could possibly spend, earning interest faster than he can spend it. Why is it that you think he's lying?

Re:That's funny.

[Moofie]

He's made a business of lying about the suitability of his software for any given task. What makes you think he's telling the truth THIS time?

He has more money than he can spend. What makes you think he has more money than he wants?

Re:That's funny.

[kubrick]

If he saw an opportunity to make more money by killing off the PC, I'm sure he'd be doing it. (Of course, he might not tell J. Random Interviewer about it.)

Well, There You Have It.

[ackthpt]

"Bill Gates has an op-ed in this morning's BW Online, in which he responds to the magazine's question Is the PC dead? with a resounding "No!" and argues that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come." Well, there you have it, I guess I might as well toss the thing in the bin when I get home. He's about as visionary as an american entering a water drinking contest in rural Mexico.

My head hurts from the market speak.

[newdamage]

I just read that so called op-ed piece and I think my ears may be bleeding from the sheer amount of marketing speak.

Bill may think web services are the next great thing for the PC "ecosystem" (WTF? when did my office become wild planet?), but quite frankly, he needs to worry about making the PC safe, secure, and usable first.

Re:My head hurts from the market speak.

[Shadow Wrought]

I too thought my head was going to explode from the rich empowerment of enabling verbage in such a diversely dynamic environment.

Bashing of his interests in the debate aside, a "Viewpoint" piece really should be devoid of marketingspeak, whether the author is Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Linus Torvalds.

Re:My head hurts from the market speak.

[bob670]

Of course, part of that responsibility and "safety" should fall on the user as well. XP can be run with little to no issue if you take some basic precautions, if this it too much for mom and pop to handle then maybe we need more web appliances? And overall XP is just as usable, if not more usable than OS X and is still years in front of desktop Linux.

Re:My head hurts from the market speak.

[cmstremi]

...but quite frankly, he needs to worry about making the PC safe, secure, and usable first.

Why? Are PC's not selling? Is Windows not selling? He has no reason to make PC's or Windows (more) safe, secure or usable until customers demand it.

News Flash: Customers don't care about those things.

Re:My head hurts from the market speak.

[northcat]

safe, secure, and usable

You think that's not market-speak? Safe and secure?

Re:My head hurts from the market speak.

[Jon_Hanson]

I think Bill needs to read this book in order to stop using words like "ecosystem" and other hollow marketing-words.

The people where I work are constantly spewing this stuff and they aren't marketing people either.

Diverse Ecosystem?

[ninjamonkey]

The only "diverse ecosystem" I know of lives in my dirty laundry.

Re:Diverse Ecosystem?

[halivar]

The only "diverse ecosystem" I know of lives in my dirty laundry.

Is yoru underwear really "laundry" if you never launder them? Just wondering...

Re:Diverse Ecosystem?

[argent]

Come now, most of the PCs out there have a thriving ecosystem of viruses and spyware.

The PC is not dead?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Can we really believe Gates on this? He's got a vested interest... maybe we should seek confirmation from Netcraft... they seem to be the authority on these matters.

Re:The PC is not dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://pc.com was running Microsoft-IIS on Windows 2000

so if it isn't already, it will be soon enough

Re:The PC is not dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we really believe Gates on this? He's got a vested interest... maybe we should seek confirmation from Netcraft... they seem to be the authority on these matters.

I think I know what Netcraft would say about those PCs that happen to be running BSD...

Re:The PC is not dead?

[geekwithglasses]

Gates: "Ohh, it's not dead."

customer: "Really?"

Gates: "No, no....it's, umm, it's resting."

custormer: "Resting?!"

Gates: "Yeah, resting. PC's prefer to knock off standing up. Beautiful ploomedge, the PC."

Customer: "Now look here, I got home and discovered that this PC was not only dead, but that the only reason it was sitting on the desk....was that it had been nailed there."

Gates: "Well I had to nail it down. If I hadn't, it would have muscled up to the window, broke out the glass with it's CD ROM trey, and flew off. Beautiful ploomedge, don't you think?"

customer: "Now you listen to me. This is an Ex-PC! It's bleedin' demised. If you hadn't nailed it to the desk, it'd be pushing up the daisies! It's shuffeled off this mortal coil and joined the bleedin' chior invisibule! IT'S FUCKING SNUFFED IT!"

Gates: (shakes desk) "THERE! See, it moved!"

customer: "You shook the desk, I saw you!"

and on and on

So...boring...losing...consciousness...

[ChuckleBug]

I hate this kind of tech marketing drivel. I'm not just bashing Gates specifically, and in fact I'd say this article isn't as bad as most, but it still boils down to a trite load of platitudes. You can summarize this kind of article easily:

"Long time ago dumb terminals look now richly appointed digital tapestry personal computing unleash potential provide collaborative strategic business enhancers future digito-infotainment convergence aggregation hub integrating synergies for advancement of opportunity. Buy more. Thanks. Oh, and thin clients suck, give people their own hard drive for all the above to happen. Thanks again."

Seriously, is there anything notable here? So very insight-free.

Re:So...boring...losing...consciousness...

[Max_Wells_SH]

You're absolutely correct. I turned up my bullshit-detector before reading, but the article was so saturated in the stuff, it practically caused a second detector to spring into existence, defying all known laws (as "articles" such as that are wont to do). FTA:

"Web services are enabling companies to unlock the knowledge of an organization, empowering individual workers to make more strategic decisions, and turning a company's most valuable asset into a strategic tool that drives competitive advantage."

That was one sentence. How is knowledge unlocked, and what knowledge was locked up? How does so-called unlocked knowledge empower invididual workers to make more strategic decisions? Strategic how? How does it turn a company's valuable asset into a strategic tool? Is this a different sense of strategic? What is a company's most valuable asset? The empowered workers? Again, how does any of this specifically drive competitive advantage? And, as it's been pointed out, what the bloody hell does any of that have to do with Carr's piece?

That was worth than buzzwordery and platitudes, that was writing with a leaky pen in a bowl of water. I don't want to come off as a Bill-Gates-is-the-devil type, because I don't think he is. I guess he is (or was) a shrewd businessman, but he really comes off as a mouthpiece, who continually consigns himself further and further to irrelevancy in his own goddamned field everytime he opens his yap. I'll take Ballmer for more stimulating things to say.

Re:So...boring...losing...consciousness...

[jahknow]

Buy more. Buy more now. And be happy.

Only if it's running BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

then it's already dying

Re:Only if it's running BSD

[affinity]

I thought BSD died last week...as it was unable to build a driver (Adaptec) for for a raid card that hosted it's CVS (previous post)...

Re:Only if it's running BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Try OpenBSD; that'll work.

Glad to help.

Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[Foofoobar]

Quite honstly, most users could work perfectly fine with a dumb terminal. All most office workers need is printer access, a web browser and basic office apps. Why do I need to set each of them up with a PC for that?

And now with Flash memory sticks, you can run entire environments separate from the OS entirely!

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

Quite honstly, most users could work perfectly fine with a dumb terminal. All most office workers need is printer access, a web browser and basic office apps. Why do I need to set each of them up with a PC for that?

Administrator Logs: March 22 2005

Remote Application Usage:
word.exe 14
excel.exe 9
access.exe 3
powerpoint.exe 53
sol.exe 13420194

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[maks_20]

IBM is working on web based Office applications (Email, Word, Excel PPoint...)

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course sol.exe is one of the basic office apps. All you did was prove his point.

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that this doesn't rule out Mobile users. (Road Warrior they liken'd to be called, although i ain't never seen one carry a laptop in dat movie). And from what I'm hearin, more an more of these fellas are seen aroun these days.

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[Foofoobar]

Well there is KIND of a solution. You can install Open Office, Firefox and Linux on a flash memory stick and run it at any internet Cafe.

Of course, this does no good if there is no internet cafe. Still, that's a good idea. Why isn't there a portable Linux Thin Client??

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[notdanielp]

powerpoint.exe 53

It's powerpnt.exe. Jeez, no wonder you never get any work done.

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just give each user a deck of cards?

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[MmmDee]

I agree with you. I was in IT in the late 70's and early 80's when PC's came into vogue. Prior to that, everyone used a central mainframe or minicomputer through dumb terminals. IMHO a few things promoted the acceptance of PC's in the corporate world: mouse/desktop interface, spreadsheets, "turbo" programming languages, AutoCAD, "instant" response time and a few other things. A few of these were available on host computers, but there wasn't the sense of privacy/ownership/entitlement that folks now enjoy with their "own" PC at work.

For awhile, the other members of my IT group and I fought bringing the PC's into the corporation, citing licensing/maintenance fees, abuse potential, support costs. Of course we were looked upon as simply trying to save our jobs.

It's amusing to me now, no longer in the IT field, to see such an emphasis on thin clients and a resurgence of interest in dumb terminals connected to central "servers." Places where I work now use PC's mostly to run terminal emulation programs connecting them to central servers/mainframes (for electronic medical record software, Outlook on-line, internet access to medical reference websites, etc)--they might as well be VT100's.

They say the poularity of yo-yos is an 8 year cycle, I suspect the popularity of dumb terminals is about 15. I predict the next big wave of PC popularity around 2020. j/k

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[patio11]

I think you overstated the excel usage.

Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

How about giving everyone a deck of cards, a pen and some paper? :p

It's cost effective! Visionary! *whatever*

We are at war....

[Anonymous Coward]

"We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia."

-- George Orwell, 1984

Gates waffles and backtalks more than any politician in history.

since the history books are written by the winner i wonder how Gates will be portrayed, evil capitalist, or savior of the human race?

Re:We are at war....

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your head out of your ass and look at the *real* politicians!

I don't understand this obsession with Gates. He's a business man and does what successful tycoons do.

It's the actual politicos you need to worry about right now - esp. in the US.

Are you sure the PC isn't dead?

[Cro Magnon]

What if it's running BSD?

"I'm getting better!"

[Hawthorne01]

"I think I'll go for a walk." "I feel happy, I feel happy, I feel...(THUD!)"

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem...

[affinity]

that is fast becoming dependant on the network and the network's application. This is regressing the PC to a media rich dumb/network terminal...

Not dead but very sick...

[ites]

... the PC as an island of personal data is facing real threats:

- invasion from parasitical software
- competition from smaller devices
- competition from web-based services
- ever cheaper hardware

Of course I'm typing this from a PC and I can't imagine any other way of working, but still... in 10 years' time:

- would I have to move physically to a box somewhere in order to read slashdot?
- would I have my data sitting on a single hard disk somewhere under a desk?
- would I be surfing on the public Internet using the same infrastructure as I use to (e.g.) access my bank accounts or write contract proposals?

The PC as "personal computer" is running out of reasons for being... ... the future belongs to secure virtual infrastructure, secure distributed data, and redundant portable devices.

The PC will eventually be relegated to a keyboard, mouse, and screen.

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[iBod]

>>the future belongs to secure virtual infrastructure, secure distributed data, and redundant portable devices.

I agree that would be a nice model for many people, but it is one that is very hard to make work in the real world (especially the security and trust aspects of it).

Personally, I'd rather have my data on a physical device that *I* own rather than pay someone to keep it all safe and secure for me.

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[geoff43230]

> The PC will eventually be relegated to a keyboard, mouse, and screen.

Good points! I think that some Mac models seem to be very close to this, right now.

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[Charcharodon]

But can I play/modify what ever games I want, run what ever software I want, use digital media any way I want?

No you say....

I'll stick with my "sick PC" thank you very much

All those thing sound very nice, much like a super model girl friend, but she sounds expensive, very high maitenance, and a big prude to boot.

My plain Jane girl next door is a cheap date, flexible, and a freak, but the best part is she won't get upset if I upgrade to a newer model without the express permission and licensing from her parents.

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[frankvl]

The PC will eventually be relegated to a keyboard, mouse, and screen.

I sure hope not! These devices are old! They'd better come up with some kind of trustworthy brain extension that would not require any further devices. Except for a housekeeping sexdoll of course.

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[Albio]

The PC will eventually be relegated to a keyboard, mouse, and screen.

I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but I am hoping that eventually the PC will be small enough and cheap enough to fit inside said peripherals.

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[ites]

can I play/modify what ever games I want, run what ever software I want, use digital media any way I want?

Of course!

Your games, your software, your digital media will be with you wherever you go. That's the whole point.

If you take a photograph it will automatically and securely be sent to your media archive and indexed so you can find it easily later.

When you leave your main console behind you'll have a smaller portable one that gives you exactly the same data and applications, only with a smaller screen and keyboard.

When you mark a media item as "shared", your friends, or the whole world, will be able to see it.

All this is an obvious progression from where we are today. Faster and ubiquitous networking, distribution and encryption of data to keep it safe...

The iPod already embodies many of these concepts, in a simple way, that's why it's so successful. Take your music anywhere...

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[16K Ram Pack]

There is already the start of this, or "thinner client", where the user switches more and more of their work to web-based than local based.

In one area, project management, people are switching to a lot of online services hosting their project plans.

I think we will see a lot of businesses start to rent services (like maybe for their accounts), with their PCs running not much else.

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[Ogerman]

Indeed, the PC as a personal data island is dying. We'll see diskless workstations that network boot Linux/BSD/whatever and are used primarily to run a somewhat evolved Mozilla or Konqueror web browser supporting SVG, CSS3, XForms, etc. Most business apps will use rich-web, standards-compliant interfaces that feel no different than native clients -- except that they will be much better integrated than anything we've seen up to this point. Office suites will have been obsoleted by web-based document management systems, a component of said integrated business apps. Native apps will still be used as needed.. graphics, multimedia, etc. But they'll all be Open Source and loaded from the network. Every workstation in the office will thus have a complete and uniform collection of software available. (Unlike today, where employees must usually beg for a license of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.)

At home, it'll be very similar.. every family member will have their own wireless terminal of sorts. All software and storage will be centralized to a server in the closet. Solid-state internal storage will allow for disconnected operation on trips, etc. but internet access will be so ubiquitous that you'll still be able to access your home web-based content portal.

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[Charcharodon]

The iPod already embodies many of these concepts, in a simple way, that's why it's so successful. Take your music anywhere...

Ipod is a work of dark magic and Steve Jobs is the Devil. At least Bill Gates doesn't pretend to be anything than other than what he is.

I could already take my music anywhere easily and movies too, and have for years, long before Ipod came around. Of course if the corporate world could have a final say I could do the same, but only in the appropriate licensed format and for a small (in their minds) monthly fee.

The Ipod in its unhacked for is simply a media player for the yuppy crowd, which is to say it is overpriced and inflexable.

Ipod is so successful for one reason only, lot's of $$ being spent on marketing, a near monopoly on downloadable content, and ease of use for the techno illiterate.

AOL used to sing the same tune, man look at the quality product they put out these days.

Re:Not dead but very sick...

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably redundantly so.

First you'd make the basic computer and storage so tiny that everyone carries one around in their wallet.

Then if they need additional computing power or peripherals, those things are provided on-site.

In effect, everyone uses a "dumb terminal" and carries around the server with them.

The PC Is Evolving, Not Dying

[WombatControl]

What we're seeing is really the continuation of the gradual shift from "big iron" mainframes to "microcomputers" to PCs to PDAs to iPods. Technology is becoming cheaper, more flexible, and more diversified.

I think the traditional PC is close to saturation. Where the money is are in things like media center/home theater PCs, secondary computers, and specialized machines. Since most everyone has a PC, the real quest is to use PC technology to replace other existing gadgets.

That's why small cheap computers like the Mac mini and home theater systems like Microsoft's Media Center Edition systems are growing while the PC market itself is relatively stagnant in comparison to the boom years.

Of course, the massive success of the iPod also points to a totally new market for consumer electronics that interfaces with a traditional PC acting like a "digital hub" as Steve Jobs calls it. That's why media features like DVD burners, FireWire and memory card inputs and large displays are the big selling points in PCs these days. It's not about a monolithic device that makes you sit in front of it to do everything, it's about a whole slew of gadgets that work seamlessly together to perform different tasks.

The concept of the PC won't go away, but the way in which PCs are used is slowly changing. It's like evolution usually goes - the big creatures die out and those smaller more agile ones flourish in the aftermath.

Re:The PC Is Evolving, Not Dying

[ackthpt]

What we're seeing is really the continuation of the gradual shift from "big iron" mainframes to "microcomputers" to PCs to PDAs to iPods. Technology is becoming cheaper, more flexible, and more diversified.

Sure. Bill gets it wrong on a regular basis, but in the short term you can find some very worrying things in what he says by reading whats between the lines or not there. I was at a CES years ago and you could see him smile while he evangelically threatened many of the vendors products on sale as these new features would be bundled into Windows XP and CE or Microsoft was rewriting the standards (isn't this great?!?!?)

Microsoft will try to keep a finger in everything, but the Midas Touch from their PC luck doesn't extend much as we see cell/camera/pda/etc become more popular and use whatever OS or software the vendor choses, as opposed to having only the choices of being stuck with Microsoft or proprietary, in-house.

PC's will have their use, particularly in the office, but at home they'll become more a portal device to entertainment, news, communications, etc., which could very well be dropping your cell phone into a cradle which has a screen, keyboard and mouse hooked up to it. Who needs that box anyway?

Re:The PC Is Evolving, Not Dying

[truthsearch]

I think the traditional PC is close to saturation. Where the money is are in things like media center/home theater PCs, secondary computers, and specialized machines. Since most everyone has a PC, the real quest is to use PC technology to replace other existing gadgets.

This is true only in the "western" world. Asia and Africa have massive growth potential for any PC related technology. Only when the PC reaches world-wide saturation will we see a really quick change in companies pushing new kinds of technologies to replace it.

Year after year

[kaos.geo]

Year after year some guru/tech hotshot pronounces the death of a key technology (last year Gates singlehandedly declared the death sentence of DVDs)
The truth is that these are plain shots in the dark.
IMHO the PC is far from becoming dead, and I am happily watching as tech honchos tear their hairs off as most of the world population refuses to upgrade their equipment/software in 2 year-cycles, and realizes that 1ghz of ANYTHING plus 256MB of ANYTHING plus a 20GB drive is more than plenty for the average user's websurfing, mail-sending and pr0n viewing! :P

Take the personal out of computing

[bitswapper]

"Take the personal out of computing"

Isn't that pretty much what microsoft did/is doing?

Bill's right, though, that the most revolutionary years are yet to come. Linux's just getting started...

Microsoft: "Is the PC dead? No!"

[Anonymous Coward]

"But we'll keep trying until it is!"

Bunk

[HotButteredHampster]

A thousand words from the pen of Mr. Gates, and not once does he make a solid case for the PC. He discusses capabilities and ubiquity, which he correctly points out has been brought by the PC. However, it does not follow that the PC will continue to be the provider of these, as new and more effective means to deliver are developed.

Meh. We'll wait and see.

HBH

This is about mid-level, office computer usage

[aftk2]

I know that Gates is replying to Businessweek, and so he has to claim that PCs will continue to "empower workers" as they gain in processing power and capability, but if he wanted to make an even more convincing argument, he should have talked about home users.

As computers get more and more powerful, I think it's going to mostly affect the two groups of users at the opposite ends of the spectrum: super-users and home users. Super users are those who need all the power they can get, all the time. These are the people working in medicine, in modeling, 3D work, video, etc...

Then you have the home users. Why will this effect home users more than corporate users? Because home usersdo more things! They'll start experimenting with audio and video on the computer (many of them already do). They'll try to run the latest games.

Finally, you have the middle-of-the-road office computer users - probably the very ones that BusinessWeek was originally talking about. These are the people whose PCs are supposedly doomed. And they might be. But the PC as a whole (as the Slashdot title would have us believe?) Not a chance.

Just One More Vulnerability

[Foofoobar]

Every PC used by a computer illiterate (or at least average office employee), is just another excuse to get viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, etc.

These people couldn't give a shit about your responsibility to maintain security; they want the latest mouse cursors and to answer that email from Zimbabwe.

Remove there ability to affect the rest of the network. Remove their PC and give them a thin clien/dumb terminal.

Empowering workers!

[Mumpsman]

"...there will be even more opportunities to empower workers and transform their productivity"

What, exactly, am I supposed to be transforming my productivity into? Because if it's /. posts, then the future is here now!

Reminds me of the quote from "Scandal"

[tjrw]

aka the film about the Profumo Affair.

"Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?"

Boss, I finished writing the Business Week article

[Anonymous Coward]

I boiled down your book "The Road Ahead" to two pages and sprinkled a couple references to Web Services, cell phones and Tablet PC. Good?

-justin

Isn't Bill always like this?

[Mr. Cancelled]

It seems like every interview I see with the guy, he's going on about how computing's future is so bright ya gotta wear shades, so-to-speak.

And then shortly after such claims, he always follows them up by pointing out that Windows will, of course, be there, paving the way for the next wave of computing.

There's something about overly optimistic people that make me immediately doubt what they're claiming. Bill's no exception... By always ignoring the bad (Windows exploits, virii, etc), and gushing about the very operating system which is causing most of these problems, he really paints a picture of someone who's totally out of touch with the modern computing scene.

To me at least...

Re:Isn't Bill always like this?

[CarlinWithers]

I think you hit the nail right on the head for me. I agree, Bill/Microsoft/Windows are no longer what PCs are about.

Microsoft certainly has a huge following in business software, but the hot topics in PERSONAL computers are ipods, torrents, firefox, etc. None of these are Microsoft products. The fact that PCs run Windows is nearly irrelevant now. What is relevant is the cool new apps people are finding. All Windows does is slow a PC user down. It fills up with viruses, spyware, and malware as people use their cool new apps.

I think this is the big chance for Apple and Linux. People love their apps, but they hate Windows.

Re:Isn't Bill always like this?

[Deliveranc3]

Bill is like the Linux Dev's He has a computer at home running his software which he's probably tweaked hell out of.

And you know what I bet it never has ANY problems!

So if all you need is specialty hardware and a round the clock tech staff of a hundred thousand programers why can't we all do it?

It's probably difficult for him to understand what the average user has to deal with EVERY TIME THEY BOOT.

Needs to connect with users...

Yet, Windows isn't geared toward business

[Himring]

The more you work with their bread'n'butter OS, the more you realize that Microsoft gears their software towards the home user, not the business. Enterprises are challenged to make XP conform to sound security models. Little things such as the fact that Windows Media Player overrides a screensaver lock by default (and good luck getting the group policy to fix this in Active Directory), to the assumption of root access by default on the XP workstation much less in the NOS itself (try changing the default network access from anything but the default -- suddenly, you can't view other machines in network neighborhood and users can't change their own passwords). Bill Gates gives "business" tongue and cheek service whilst his developers write an OS for the home and for entertainment....

Automation

[dfn5]

Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.

Isn't this what a good expect script is for? ;-)

South Park had it right

[Anonymous Coward]

General: I thought this new Windows 98 was supposed to better?

Gates: It is!! Over 78% more [BANG! the general shoots him in the head]

[Gates falls dead]

He is correct

[Dark Paladin]

I don't see the PC leaving us either today, tomorrow or next year. People walk around with them (laptops) so they can work away from the office, or they have their own special programs on their machine.

I think what he misses the opportunity to talk about isn't if the PC is going away, but "does Windows matter"? The last company I was at switched 95% of the company to Open Office to save costs (a 400 person environment for huge saving for them). Many of the penetration testers and security analysts I work with now use Macs because they can get to all of the UNIX tools they need without having to reboot into Windows to work on Microsoft Office files. (I know, they could do that in Crossover, but the Macs are easier - and these are hard core OpenBSD/Linux guys).

So the question is, does Windows dead? No, not yet, and I think like IBM they will always be around. But others are nipping at the heals, between Firefox on one end, consoles (which is eating away a lot of the game market from the PC), Apple is rising again (back to 5% by the end of this year by some analysts) - so MS can't just use the monopoly as a battering ram to force Windows on everyone.

They kind of remind me of Napoleon's march in Russia. Lots of momentum, big army, took over everything - but over time, the things that Napoleon couldn't fight (the weather, like Free software compitition), or supply chains (consoles eating away at the game market), or just dumb luck (Apple's iPod success turning into a method to draw users to buy new Macs, especially at $600 a pop) brought him down. Maybe 10, 15 years from now we'll look back at a market 33% Windows, 33% Apple, and 33% Linux (on the desktop - the server I imagine will be 40% Windows, 40% Linux/Unix, 20% Apple) and wonder how it all happened.

Funny that one of Mr. Gate's big heroes is Napoleon. I hadn't remembered it until I was almost done writing this.

Re:He is correct

[AndroidCat]

I heard an interesting theory about what done in Napoleon's army in retreat from Moscow. Apparently their uniforms had tin/pewter buttons everywhere. Apparently tin works fine for buttons, cheaper than brass, until the temperature drops below a certain point. Then tin becomes brittle junk that shatters. Suddenly all the coat, vest, pant, suspender, fly buttons and what-not vanished and the cold got in.

Death by cheap military contractor. (Like that's never happened before!)

I'm not saying that it's true (I'd like to see some more proof, including accounts from the march), but it makes a good story. I guess the moral would be "Always know where your tin buttons are during a phase change!" (Or not.)

The PC isn't dead, but PC innovation is

[pocari]

Typewriters were around for a long time virtually unchanged. There is no doubt that the Intel/Microsoft platform has become the Wang word processor of the 21st century, essential to every office.

The circumstances that led to the PC revolution are long since past. When the anti-trust case against Microsoft was settled four years ago with no consequences, investors and entrepreneurs were told that there is no reason to bother to do anything Microsoft might have an interest in, because Microsoft would be free to use the Windows monopoly to crush them.

During the dot-com boom, almost all software talent went to Internet development, sucking the oxygen out of innovation meant for the PC. Bringing things on-line is important and valuable, but the 10,000th brochure website, or even the second on-line bookstore, is not innovation.

The dot-com crash in Silicon Valley has meant the loss of 400,000 jobs there and 400,000 people moving out of the valley. It's debatable how much of this is due to outsourcing, but for every job lost to some other location, that's one fewer young engineer cooking up ideas in a garage. India and China have gained, but the software industry has lost something by the scattering of young talent; the disappearance of tech veterans has long-term consequences, too.

There are still business opportunities in cleaning up security messes and customization of enterprise software products, and there always will be, but none of this really counts as innovation.

When I moved to Silicon Valley in 1995, it wasn't obvious that Microsoft was going to dominate the way it does today, or that the Internet would suck the oxygen out of other kinds of software projects for a while. The smart money and adventurous people have moved on to other things. Forever.

Re:The PC isn't dead, but PC innovation is

[Anonymous Coward]

"but for every job lost to some other location, that's one fewer young engineer cooking up ideas in a garage."

Bollocks. What do you think, the engineer moves away from the valley and promptly dies? That's rather like claiming that every automobile job that's lost in Detroit to a Japanese Manufacturer means that there's one less gearhead tinkering with his car in the garage.

The type of person cooking up ideas in a garage will do so in the valley, puget sound, (hel)L.A., NYC or Des Moines, Iowa. Silicon valley was created at a fortiutous juncture in history, and is not indicative of the only method of success.

Re:The PC isn't dead, but PC innovation is

[pocari]

What do you think, the engineer moves away from the valley and promptly dies? ... The type of person cooking up ideas in a garage will do so in the valley, puget sound, (hel)L.A., NYC or Des Moines, Iowa. Silicon valley was created at a fortiutous juncture in history, and is not indicative of the only method of success.

What makes Silicon Valley different is that it remains the only place that has a concentration of all the kinds of people needed to make a successful high-tech company, from young restless engineers to crusty old engineers to gaggles of IP lawyers and restaurants full of venture capitalists. I came to take that for granted until an overseas assignment where I learned why that matters. Software companies have really strange accounting rules, which you have to explain to accountants elsewhere. If you are the first software company your website designer has dealt with, they think 1's and 0's are an original idea! Engineers don't think much of software marketeers to begin with, but imagine what they're like if they've never worked for a software company before! It is not that it can't be done elsewhere, but it's much more difficult.

I think sending young engineers overseas or even to other parts of the U.S. has long term bad consequences for the Silicon Valley ecosystem. But 13% of the workforce is already gone.

Garr's Idiotic Sturm and Drang

[stonedonkey]

I don't know about you guys, but my company, on the order of 350 people nationally, doesn't upgrade every time a new CPU comes out, and we all have at least one computer at our desks. And as we all know, weak security is overwhelmingly a Windows problem, not a PC problem. Oh, but he said it happens every couple years. Oh, but before that, he implied that it's a constant stream of upgrades. Never mind that security has overwhelmingly been a Windows problem, not a PC problem. Twit.

And when it comes to hosted apps, that's probably more cost-effective in the long run...as long as you can guarantee rock-solid uptime and consistently updated security...Oops. Better not be using PCs for that task, eh? Twit.

There, now you don't have to wade through Gatesian propaganda.

How long have we been hearing this drivel?

[DesScorp]

"The PC is dying; it'll be replaced by single-purpose Internet enabled devices".

Not only is the PC not dying, it's uses are being expanded more every day. And the onslaught of gaming consoles certainly hasn't hurt the PC, or PC gaming. If there was ever an "Internet enabled PC killer", that should've done it. Keep in mind that many of the people predicting the PC's demise are manufacturers of these competing devices. It's in their interest to tell you not to buy a PC, but to buy their gadget instead.

PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[ShieldWolf]

"For a few hundred dollars per employee, companies can now empower their workers with raw processing power that would have been unfathomable just a few years ago. "

Cost of Windows XP Professional: $299 plus taxes.

Cost of hardware: apparently $0

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf are you talking about?

Last I checked, XP was well under $150

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost of Windows XP Professional: $299 plus taxes.

People pay for Windows? Since when?

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[ShieldWolf]

Why don't you try checking out Microsoft's own webpage for XP Professional pricing .

Businesses can't use XP Home because you can't log into a domain server with it etc.

I was of course being a little facetious in that some businesses can get volume discounts for licenses either directly from MS, or more likely, through their hardware provider e.g. Dell.

My main point is valid though in that Windows XP Professional is priced obscenely high when compared to the hardware it runs on. Compare the current situation to the one 17 years ago when an average PC cost $2000+ and MS-DOS was ~$80 dollars.

Yes Windows XP does a lot more than DOS did, but the hardware does a a hell of a lot more too (orders of magnitude), and for LESS money.

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone has to buy the first copy. Even in China =)

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but you have to keep in mind that for someone with as much money as Gates, 50 hundred dollar bills is still pretty few =P

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"Cost of Windows XP Professional: $299 plus taxes"

Not even close. You can purchse XP Professional with media for around $140 legally from many websites.

Large OEMs like Dell or HP pay less than $100 for every copy of XP Professional. They get XP Home for around $45, too.

You didn't *really* think that the major OEMs were stupid enough to pay retail, did you?

No. Of coruse not. You were just spreading FUD.

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I check thier pricing? Do you pay MRSP? No, of course not.

Windows XP Pro can be had, anywhere, for under $150.

buycheapsoftware.com has it for $136

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not spreading FUD. he's repeating the price quoted on Microsoft's own website for the full version of Windows XP Pro.
It cannot be FUD if it's true.

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[ShieldWolf]

Not even close. You can purchse XP Professional with media for around $140 legally from many websites.

Please point out a single legal website that sells XP Professional FULL Version (non-upgrade) for $140.

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://buycheapsoftware.com/details~productID~1791 .asp

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Anonymous Coward]

As I mentioned in another thread, the price you mention is for the upgrade not the full version.

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[ShieldWolf]

Touche. :)

But buycheapsoftware's business model is somewhat unsustainable in that they GIVE you a piece of hardware in order for the software to qualify as OEM. All they are doing really is passing you industrial garbage (used or defective motherboards I assume) in order to be a valid OEM licensee.

This is a fairly sketchy practice that I assume MS would put a stop to if many businesses went this route.

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Bambi Dee]

It's for the OEM version, which can't be used to upgrade anything AFAIK. It is a full version - you're just not allowed to transfer it to another PC, unless, I suppose, that one's nigh-identical from a WPA point of view. I've changed video cards, RAM, drives on an OEM XP PC without ever having to phone in, but I'm not so sure what would've happened if I'd changed the mainboard or some such more "PC-identifying" part. Moreover, you aren't entitled to MS tech support; it's the OEM that's supposed to support you. Finally, there's no box or anything, just a booklet shrinkwrapped with a CD.

Or maybe I'm misreading everything by now, I should be in bed.

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a fuck what Microsoft charges for retail? Jesus, get over it. Businesses don't buy ANYTHING retail, and they definitely don't buy boxed operating systems separate from their computers. Companies work with Dell (or whomever) to get dozens or hundreds of machines at a time. You can even get volume or corporate licensing for Windows through the PC manufacturer.

Now, I don't know what the final machine costs each company. But for anyone buying in volume, I'd guess that it's a few hundred dollars.

F. U. D.

Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:

[dcam]

Exactly. I just put a box together and the cost of windows XP (OEM) was 1/5th of the cost of the box. Add on the cost of office pro and we are close to 1/2 the cost of the PC being Micorosoft software.

Personal computing will thrive, but the PC won't

[Nooface]

He is right that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come, but the "PC", as defined by an Intel Processor + a Microsoft operating system, is dead. That doesn't mean that the PC is somehow vanishing or becoming irrelevant. Mainframes and minicomputers were once also thought to be obsolete, but those platforms continue to be used widely today. It simply implies that, like its predecessors, the PC will remain important, but its central role as a driver of innovation in the technology industry is waning. The real growth and innovation is happening with new kinds of devices that are definitely "personal", but have a completely different design from the classical "PC". For example, worldwide mobile phone sales jumped 30 percent in 2004, reaching 674 million units. That compares with PC shipments that grew 14.2% to 176.5 million units. Other devices like handheld music players are just getting started. These types of devices will define personal computing for the vast majority of users in the future, not PCs.

PC is dead!

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Yay! I'm going to celebrate by planting a big kiss on my boss' lips (she's female). Then I'm going to e-mail some dirty jokes to everyone. Finally I'm going to change the sign on the HR department to MAN department. I'm so sick of this political correctness.

I'm confused

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

If, as he suggests, the "Web-services revolution blurs the distinction between information, applications, and services on PCs and mobile devices", how exactly is the PC "the centerpiece of the innovation"? Wouldn't Web-services, and thus Web standards and networks, be the focal point?

For digital rights, the PC must live.

[AtariAmarok]

The PC (and the Mac, etc) must survive in order for us to retain digital rights.

It is a lot easier to overcome fair-rights-denying DRM on a console where you can run and write programs that do this for you. It is a lot harder on an "Audrey", an iPod, or a Palm Pilot.

Do you think there would be anything like "PlayFair"/ hymm (which let us listen on our own machines to something we paid for) for iTunes files if iPods typically were connected directly to the Internet for music download, and there was no PC or Mac in between?

No surprises there...

[what_the_frell]

This statement coming from the guy whose main bread and butter came from the PC industry, and will be firmly cemented there for quite some time.

And there is much of my quarrel with BillG

[mwood]

Certainly some computing should be personal. But some is not and should not be. I have to work ten times as hard on Windows PeeCees as I do on other computers to get them to do impersonal things, like send me a summary of their own activity for the last week without my having to push a button.

Some very useful computation is not personal, interactive, exploratory, or "an experience". And Microsoft traditionally just didn't "get" this. Like the old robots in Asimov's "Runaround", supposedly automatic processes just won't go without a human in the saddle giving orders. They are getting better at this, but still have far to go in order to catch up with the 1960s, let alone the 21st century.

I often laugh bitterly when I hear about the "increased productivity" attributed to gadgets that make me do everything manually rather than just doing the work and sending me a note on how it went.

If you want my recommendation for your software product, ask yourself, "would there be any point in having this run automatically when nobody is around?" And if the answer is "yes", *make it easy to do so*.

Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG

[argent]

If you want my recommendation for your software product, ask yourself, "would there be any point in having this run automatically when nobody is around?" And if the answer is "yes", *make it easy to do so*.

Eg, Airport Express should come up without me having to log in on the console of my Macintosh.

Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG

[mario_grgic]

And there's your problem. If computing is personal why the heck do you care what someone else's PC has been doing last week? None of your business, lol.

Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG

[mwood]

It's not someone else's PC; it's one of the fleet of servers for which I'm responsible. Or it might be the PC on someone else's desk, which belongs to the company, and for which I'm responsible (along with 199 other PCs). I had to figure out how to make all the workstations in the building boot at 04:00 daily, not so long ago, because our Client Support team asked for it.

It's the company's PC; it lives in the office allocated to you but it isn't your property.

Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG

[mario_grgic]

Perhaps it's time to install Korn shell port to all the machines. MKS Inc. makes an excellent Unix toolkit with good Korn/BASH/C/Tcl Shells and a bunch of tools for administrators.

Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG

[mwood]

Not a bad idea. CMD.EXE is a gigantic improvement over COMMAND.COM, but even the most featureless Unix shell can still run rings around it.

However, I haven't seen any shell that can, for example, peer into the Registry and enumerate all of the software products installed using MSI. Some stuff is done differently enough in MS Windows that shell scripting would at best be an all-thumbs solution.

MS is beginning to address this, but they're still years behind the curve and will be so for a while. And that's at least partially due to this attitude I'm talking about, that a computer should be something that belongs to one person, is used only by him, should never do anything unless he is sitting in front of it pushing buttons, and is nobody else's concern. Real businesses don't operate that way -- it's far too expensive and it slows everybody down.

(The other attitude problem they need to solve is the "what users need to do is what we have packaged for them" problem. Kinda like how the U.S. automakers felt just before Datsun and Toyota began eating their lunch. Visit the real world and you'll see people doing things never imagined on the MS campus. The customer also has a right, and need, to innovate.)

Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG

[mario_grgic]

Actually, with MKS Korn shell, you can do that easily. It has all the standard Unix tools that work exactly as on Unix plus a hefty collection of win specific tools for system administration (registry, services etc). It also includes VI editor (command line and GUI versions), and connectivity tools (remote secure shell, telnet, rexec to execute a single command on remote computer etc). Decent perl and awk implementations etc. Pretty poweful stuff.

Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG

[mwood]

Access to Registry data is not enough; you need to be able to interpret them. Take a look at some of the horrible undocumented BLOBs that Explorer rams into the Registry, for example, or contemplate just how easy it would be for a new version of MSI to thoroughly change all of the rules without notice.

Look at the AT command, for instance, which still works on XP as it did originally, even though the data have been moved out of the Registry into an opaque file format. Programs which use the ancient, deprecated OS/2 LAN Manager compatibility APIs won't notice the difference; scripts which deal with the data directly will find that there are no data there anymore.

MKS may have supplied an AT-alike, and a zillion other adapters, but my point is that this stuff should have been scriptable from Day 1, and we have to go to third parties like MKS to give us what they can from what should have been a fundamental set of system administration tools. And as long as the attitude at MS is that there will always be one person per machine and he'll always be there to work the UI, that problem will persist and grow.

I used to have TOPS-10, TOPS20, and VMS systems that pretty much managed themselves after I'd built a few scripts to implement our local notions of good system administration, leaving me more time to work on special cases. I do as much and more today on Unix systems. But the MS Windows boxes around here consume incredible amounts of time even with all their "enterprise" features pushed to the limit, because the product wasn't designed for "fleet operations".

I'm happy for all the third-party help I can get, but my problem is that the base system continues to evolve away from manageability, not toward it. MS have begun addressing this, as I've said, but right now it's frequently one step forward, two steps back, and changing that will require changing the way the company as a whole thinks about computer usage and users. Yet there's the company's top strategist chanting "personal, personal, personal". I expect a long wait.

of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

here i am typing on it just fine, and nothing at all is wrong wi

Grinding to a halt...

[hoggoth]

> Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.

Companies like, oh say... Microsoft.

Bill Gates- "The PC is not dead...

[gmuslera]

... that blue screen usually dissapear after restarting it"

Here it comes

[devphaeton]

I'm just waiting to see how many comments until someone pulls out all the Apple/OSX/Mac knee-jerk partyline stuff, and then everyone else either counters it or gives the already trumped excuse of "if only their hardware didn't cost so much..."

etc

(i'm a schnoock, i know ;))

Re:Just One Question...

[Anonymous Coward]

large form factor PCs are the perfect crown to go with the Emperor's new clothes.

im sure there will allways be space for them in homes but with the cost per square foot of most office buildings its just not effective to use LFF PCs. where i work they switched from LFF to SFF PCs and were able to put 15% more people in teh same space, saving my company over $5million a year.

and thats just one building.

"People who don't see the Emperor's clothes usually get accused of lacking vision."

-- Alan Smithee

the pc is dying

[yagu]

And the DRM and MPAA and the.... are the ones instigating. Only time will tell, but I've always felt PC's are mostly a novelty and the ONLY thing that has kept the buying public in lockstep so far has been the ongoing promise of "This time we really really mean it when we say we've vastly improved it (Microsoft, especially), and it is MUCH easier to use...", with the implicit eventual promise PC's will become sublime. If you've ever read the Peanuts cartoon, and remember the ongoing relationship between Lucy and Charlie Brown with Lucy promising "this time" she won't pull the football away when Charlie Brown tries to kick it, you may have a feeling for whay I think the PC industry is pulling off (away?).

The only way PC's will become sublime is when they've sublimated into the background as os's tend more and more to be implemented as embedded technology, thus making other ordinary items and appliances more efficient, more effective, easier to use, more powerful, etc.

Let's face it (IMO)... computers are amazingly complex machines, and it's close to a miracle they can be navigated at all, but I'm not seeing any evidence they are becoming easier to use, just more confusing. But I AM seeing evidence of people throwing up their hands and giving up... (my neighbors have gotten rid of their computer, my parents only keep theirs because I PROMISE to continue to help them and support them with it.... many others I know never use their computers and say they really don't have a need for further purchases...) Maybe the marketing machine can continue to sustain the PC marketplace, but I doubt it...

Not dead, but loosing the mindset wars

[Sr. Zezinho]

The issue is not whether the PC is dying or not [insert Netcraft joke here], but that the landscape around it has changed. Gates is correct when he talks about a "rich ecosystem", but he isn't able to support is idea that the PC will remain the dominate force in the future.

He also isn't able to justify how can the PC bring more productivity to the office. I haven't seen any signs of that lately, but maybe I've been working in the wrong places. I can see increases in productivity in replacing the PC in many situations, though.

It is hard to defend that the PC era is just beginning when so many of us already dont have some of our most important information on a PCs: our email, contacts, personal photo archives are often elsewhere.

The article is a bit strange because it identifies real trends, but jumps to illogical conclusions. It is a sign of the times that Bill Gates can't offer any clear vision of the future and that the reality that he describes can exist without Microsoft.

Slashdot is dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously...

Mr. Gates has selective memory

[imnoteddy]

From Mr. Gates article:
Back when IBM (IBM ) launched its first personal computer in 1981, business computing was a scarce resource. If a company was large enough even to afford computers, they were mostly so-called dumb terminals hooked up to large mainframe computers.

Mr. Gates seems to forget the Apple II, which a lot of businesses owned before 1981. IBM did not create the idea of personal computers for business, they merely responded (grudgingly) to their customers.

Bill should know this - unless he's forgotten that his company existed before 1981 - he's no doubt just trying to spin it his way. In any case he doesn't actually address the issues in the original article which argues that intranet/internet based applications will make life easier for corporate computing.

People who can only spin the past are likely to be spun by the future.

Re:Mr. Gates has selective memory

[The Bungi]

Yeah, let's compare the business penetration of the Apple II with the scope of what later became the PC clone market.

That makes a lot of sense, yes. Hey, I knew a company in the 80s that had a bunch of Tandys! You're right!

Jeez.

Re:Mr. Gates has selective memory

[synth7]

I think that what BillG is referring to coporate/enterprise computing, not small business computing. The big boys went with big [blue] iron. What were the computers used by the banks, telcos, and major manufacturers?

Re:Mr. Gates has selective memory

[Billly Gates]

Hmm I happen to disagree.

How did MS win a monopoly? They got it from IBM because no respectable business would run any pc unless it had the name IBM.

Once the inferior IBM pc came out they monopolized the market overnight.

Small businesses may have experimented with early micro-computers but mainframes were everything. Infact my old man almost got fired back in 1985 for chosing IBM pc's on every desk instead of dumb terminals and an IBM 380 mainframe.

Re:Mr. Gates has selective memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps he should have gotten fired. Most businesses then and still today would be much better off with thin clients (dumb terminals). No two ways to look at it. Your dad just got caught up in the "I want a kumputah on my desk too" mentality. During that time frame, minicomputers from HP and Dec were quite capable of running nearly any software a 380 could (especially if you're talking about any software tasks that could be transfered from a mainframe to a PC). I bet many of those people with PC's on their desk, used them as terminal emulators to speak with the mainframe.

PC inefficiency

[ElitistWhiner]

...in Retail the PC is responsible for customer wait times at the checkout counter - compared to 20 years ago transactions depended only on the skill of the cashier not PC software. ...in Automotive service car repairs require as long as 20 mins. for a Service Writer who's sole job is only to intake cars and enter their problems into the computer - compared to 20 years ago the car got dropped off someone took the keys and you were on your way 10 mins max. ...in Healthcare PC's stop your every point of progress through the system to verify your birthdate, name and address - compared to 20 years ago a nurse asked what you needed to see a doctor for took 5 mins.

Embedded is the New Personal.

[torpor]

PC's aren't dead, they're just cheaper, and easier to use, and everywhere, and not just running the same operating system, and not exclusively a Microsoft thing, any more, either ..

What is dead is the "use the desktop war as a straw man" tactic. Too much code written for that to be a nuisance now!

thanks....

[crumbz]

I love the tagline.

"Chief Software Architect"

yeah....thanks alot. At least he is man enough to take credit for Windows.

Just the claps.

[tmhsiao]

I got mad at the PC
For screwing up the Jumble caper.
I hope I don't see its name in the paper.
In the obituarieeees,
'cause that would mean that it's dead
The PC Is Not Dead
I'm so glad the PC is not Dead.

Try getting a thin client Moniter

[spicydragonz]

I was pricing an entry level PC for my parents and the price for a good monitor almost swamped the price of a PC. The incremental cost between a thin client and a full PC are small. The real cost savings is in the software.

Re:Try getting a thin client Moniter

[arkanes]

The real cost savings is in the software.

In my experience, software costs *more* in a thin client environment, because you still need per-user licenses and you ALSO need to license the server. The cost savings is in administration. There's zero benefit in any other area.

Other things that are not dead!

[dpbsmith]

The CRT is not dead! I see dozens of them in use every day and CompUSA has lot of them!

Film is not dead! I can buy those familiar yellow boxes of it right in my supermarket checkout line!

Vinyl LPs are not dead! DJ's still use them and you can buy new turntables in Best Buy!

The vacuum tube is not dead! Audio hobbyists still insist on them!

CP/M is not dead! It survives on in Novell Netware servers! Which are not dead, either!

The Oldsmobile is not dead! I still see them on the road!

VHF analog broadcasts are not dead!

Typewriters are not dead! Carbon paper is not dead! Slide rules are not dead! Rotary calculators are not dead! The Bodoni typeface is not dead! The Cinerama wide-screen process is not dead! Spirit duplicators and mimeograph machines are not dead!

Bill Gates is not dead! And neither am I!

But Bill Gates and I are both older than we used to be.

Re:Other things that are not dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

And in other news, Generalissmo Francisco Franco *is* still dead.

Re:Other things that are not dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Oldsmobile is not dead! I still see them on the road!

...usually being towed. But carry on.

Re:Other things that are not dead!

[ankhank]

> Spirit duplicators and mimeograph machines...

I want inkjet cartridges that will print out in Hektograph (recipes for inks here)
(http://www.fell.demon.co.uk/steve/inks.htm l)

and Mimeograph (http://www.repeatotype.com/mimeo.html)

with the right colors and smells.

Re:Other things that are not dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos for mentioning Cinerama.

Vorbis is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Without support from the leading music player software and portable device, vorbis isn't going anywhere.

Sucka.

Re:Vorbis is dead

[pla]

Vorbis is dead

...Just like the PC.


Without support from the leading music player software

WinAmp plays Vorbis files just fine, thankyouverymuch. Oh, you meant that proprietary DRM-crippled bag of bits needed to redeem my winning Pepsi caps? Feh.

Actually, for accuracy, I would have to say "Windows Media Player plays Vorbis files just fine". But as you can well imagine, I find that even more intolerable than iTunes. And, since WinAmp comes in as #2 (with iTunes somewhere around #6, I believe), it will suffice to make my point - Namely, even something totally ubiquitous in the Mac doesn't even rank in the bigger picture. Biggest fish in the koi pond, meet a small shark.


and portable device

You mean the "Car CD player", most of which still don't even do MP3s? Or for more personally portable, the "CD Walkman", still about 10M units ahead of the iPod? Nope, no Ogg. No AAC, either.


Hey, I like the iPod. I consider it a cute little gadget. If Apple decided to play well with others, not charge more than everyone else for a given level of hardware, and lose the sneer, I'd probably buy one. But half a dozen comparable, cheaper, and most importantly, DRM-free devices exist from manufacturers that don't want to lock me in with their own proprietary format (well, you could point to ATRAC, but I don't even think Sony itself takes that seriously outside their MiniDisc recorders).

Re:Vorbis is dead

[Theaetetus]

WinAmp plays Vorbis files just fine, thankyouverymuch. Oh, you meant that proprietary DRM-crippled bag of bits needed to redeem my winning Pepsi caps? Feh.

Perhaps I'm confused... Where is iTunes DRM-crippled, as you suggest? I put in a CD, I rip it into my preferred format, I freely listen to it, I burn mix CDs, I burn mp3 CDs, I burn archive CD copies, etc. What DRM?
Oh... You mean the tracks that I might purchase from the iTunes Music Store are DRM-crippled. Just like the tracks you might purchase from Napster, Real, Microsoft's new music store (coming soon), Sony, etc. 'Cause you know that those are DRM-crippled, too, right?
Also, "DRM-crippled" I suspect means different things to you than most people. To you, it means "has DRM". To other people, it means "has DRM that prevents me from doing what I want". Can you burn songs you purchase on iTunes to CD? Yes. Can you put them on your music player? Yes. Can you transfer them to other computers in your house? Yes. Can you upload them onto Limewire? No. But why would you want to? There's no 'crippling' action there, if it doesn't prevent you from doing what you'd like.

Actually, for accuracy, I would have to say "Windows Media Player plays Vorbis files just fine". But as you can well imagine, I find that even more intolerable than iTunes. And, since WinAmp comes in as #2 (with iTunes somewhere around #6, I believe), it will suffice to make my point - Namely, even something totally ubiquitous in the Mac doesn't even rank in the bigger picture. Biggest fish in the koi pond, meet a small shark.

I can't find any figures whatsoever for music player software market penetration. I can find figures for online music store market penetration, and iTMS is way ahead of everyone else, and since you can only access it with iTunes, that puts iTunes ahead, marketshare-wise. Perhaps your figures are including all the pre-installed WMP players on all new PCs?
Do they get used? If not, doesn't count.

Hey, I like the iPod. I consider it a cute little gadget. If Apple decided to play well with others, not charge more than everyone else for a given level of hardware, and lose the sneer, I'd probably buy one

Welcome to the $99 iPod Shuffle, then. At $99 for 512MB, it's a great deal over the $89 for 128MB nearest competitor. Find me a comparable player with comparable features for the same price or better, and I'll grant you this point... But keep in mind that comparable features includes the size and weight and ease of use.

But half a dozen comparable, cheaper, and most importantly, DRM-free devices exist from manufacturers that don't want to lock me in with their own proprietary format

And here you have a disconnect. Those manufacturers don't have proprietary formats because they aren't content providers. The content providers aren't locking you 'cause they don't make players. So, Microsoft, Real, etc. can claim they aren't trying to lock you in to their DRM-crippled proprietary format, and Rio and others making players that will only play WMA9 files can claim they're not locking you in, since they don't sell WMA9 files. If they weren't trying to lock you in, they'd provide capability to play industry standard MPEG-4 files (also known as AAC). If they really weren't trying to lock you in, they could license the Fairplay format from Apple and let their players play iTMS AAC files in addition to WMA9 files from Microsoft and rm files from Real.

I get the same reponse . . .

[harley_frog]

from users when I say, "Your PC is dead." Only, they usually respond by screaming "Nooooooooooo!"

semantic gripes with TFA

[happymedium]

"As processing power, network bandwidth, storage capacity, and advanced software continue to evolve at rates that meet or beat Moore's Law..."

Is it just me or does Moore's Law say nothing about networking, storage, or software? And also, hasn't the pace of technology been not quite keeping up with the Law recently? For example, despite other enhancements such as faster buses, CPU clock speed seems to have hovered around 3 GHz for a while.

Hmm... if Bill Gates can be this intellectually lazy, maybe Linux has a shot after all.

Re:semantic gripes with TFA

[PitaBred]

Yeah... last I heard Moore only talked about transistor counts on chips. Oh well. Not like anoyone would ever take a simple observation and try to extrapolate it into a much larger trend.

"OMG! It was 1 degree hotter on average this summer than last year! Globalwarmingskyisfallingwe'reallgonnadie@!@#$@#$! !"
"Some Americans are pretentious, stupid assholes, so they must all be"

I leave other examples as an exercise for the reader

Re:semantic gripes with TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

No he's clearly saying that software in the future will require more resources than are being made available. i.e. system requirements will triple while actual systems built will only double.

What defines dead really?

[hellfire]

Is the PC market stagnant? Yes it is, because the market is saturated. It might start to fall off soon.

Will the market for PCs completely die off? No. Top of the line PCs will continue to sell. Either for business reasons or because twinks need to have the absolute latest and greatest, the high end will continue to require sell contained PCs. However, most people would be content with graphical dumb terminals at this point.

Will the paradigm shift? You bet your ass. Expect interesting things in the future, such as more powerful PDAs that replace your desktop and your laptop. Expect more consumer gadgets and several All in one devices that aren't quite PCs or PDAs. Expect wireless networking to take off and free us from needing a PC on our desktop wired to a little modem box in the corner of our house.

Bill doesn't want people to change their ideas about how they use computers today. When the public radically shifts it's ideas on what to use in terms of computers and electronics, big companies like Microsoft suffer because they can't shift fast enough to meet those new ideas.

These are not the PCs you are looking for...

[indy_Muad'Dib]

Gates must be talking about the low cost and popularity of the Mac Mini^H^H^H^H^H^H^ small form factor PCs as compared to standard XT style PCs.

Thin Clients...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thin clients are the way to go...

A corporation does not need a $500 space heater under every desk in the office. It's a waste of not only the money used to [buy,install,maintain] it; it's also a waste of resources. I've been in hundreds of offices where the computer is left on 24 hours a day; even one where the employee was on maternity leave for six weeks. Install a thin client that powers on in less time than it takes Windows to boot, and that waste can be stopped.

Thin clients are better in an office network environment than stand alone PCs. Bill Gates won't tell you that, because then you don't buy a copy of Windows for every employee every couple of years.

Computer acting up? Just haul a spare out of the back room and be up and running again in a couple minutes. I can't tell you how many times I've been called out on "emergencies". "I have a big deal going down and my computer has died. I need it fixed NOW!"

Need to backup the critical data of 50 employees? Copy everything in /home to a NAS every night rather than having to set-up backup software on every single computer in the building. You won't get yelled at when the idiot kills the program in the taskbar and the data never gets backed up.

Away from your desk and need to print an important document? Logon to any handy station with your account and password, and have your personal desktop just like you were at your own computer, from anywhere in the network.

Can you do a better job of maintaining a dozen servers or hundreds of individual computers?

Did somebody turn off the antivirus so they could see the naked pictures of Anna Kornikova their "buddy" sent them? I know a guy who did it THREE times, because he REALLY wanted those pictures. Or, did they turn off the firewall so they could install some stupid screensaver that downloads Nascar pictures every fifteen minutes?

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." Reduce is first in the list because it's the most important.

Bring out yer dead!

[Lovesquid]

Well, since they're dead, I'll take those pesky PC corpses off your hands for you.

CorporatePC is dying,the chief architect killed IT

[NZheretic]

Read the article that Bill Gates, chief software architect, is reponding to. Consider the number of MAJOR enterprise API overhauls that Microsoft has presented to in-house developers to interface with Microsoft Office, Access and client side Internet Explorer. Client side development on the Microsoft platform has become a decade long Vendor Dependent Death March.

As "chief software architect", Bill Gates is responsible for killing a lot of in-house client side development. And don't make the claim that .NET is going to improve that situation, because Microsoft is going to introduce yet another major paradigm shift with Avalon.

Read Vendor Dependent Death Marches VS Open Kaizen

Time to wake up...

[chiphart]

Is this http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/pearpc_x p.jpg
PearPC screen shot good enough for you? Works here.

Re:Time to wake up...

[pla]

Is this PearPC screen shot good enough for you? Works here.

Actually, yes, I have nothing against emulation for running a few programs here and there (and in some cases, emulation does a whole lot better than the real thing, such as with old console video games).

But "0 MHz PowerPC G3"? I hope it performs a bit better than that... ;-)

Re:Time to wake up...

[chiphart]

My friend, that just means it's infinitely fast.

Yes, it's slow. But it works!

Re:Just One Question...

[NeoSkandranon]

I'm not saying you're lying, but I don't see how that works unless by removing the space the PC was taking up you get to ptu two people at a desk

Gates is way out of date...

[Anita Coney]

I love this quote from Bill: "investments isn't measured in megahertz"

Does he even know that PCs nowadays, even Apples, have CPUs that are measured in multiple gigahertz?!

Well, at least we know that he wrote that himself, because I can't imagine someone working for Bill being that ignorant.

Tools are tools

[smartsaga]

Use a specific tool for a specific need, period.

Of course, how can Bill sell his terminal services server products if doesn't have a market to sell them to? huh?

Simple marketing... still I can't believe people actually listen to Bill and his ideas. Maybe a Linux thin client project instead... ^_^

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=k12l tsp

Your thin clients are belong to us... get it?

Have a good one.

Bill's right [this time]

[krray]

Bill may be right ... this time. No, the PC is not dead. It's just getting started IMHO. For the last decade X10 has controlled the lighting in both home and office for myself. Along with other misc functions such motion detected lit hallways, stairs, etc. not to mention the HVAC unit. MINIMAL hardware expense, nonexistent licensing costs (Linux based, of course :). All of which has easily paid for the cost of hardware in temperature control alone -- with light savings as an added bonus.

Of course the down side is the wife always complaining when we go somewhere that their bathroom doesn't light itself. :)

The iMac has slid in comfortably as a entertainment device -- almost beating out TiVO. For sound nothing beats another device - the SliMP3 player which happens to tap the iMac for its source of music. Of course ... have iPod, will travel. :)

There's only one thing missing in everything I've mentioned: MICROSOFT

Translation

[dspisak]

"The PC market isn't dead"

what Bill really means

"The market for my product is still growing ergo MS products will continue to see double digit growth thus pleasing our investors"

ob

[Anonymous Coward]

PC: "I'm not dead yet."

Netcraft Confirms It...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official. Netcraft confirms: The PC is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered PC community when IDC confirmed that PC market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that the PC has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The PC is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict the PC's future. The hand writing is on the wall: the PC faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the PC because the PC is dying. Things are looking very bad for the PC. As many of us are already aware, the PC continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

The Windows XP PC is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Micro$oft developers only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: the PC is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Micro$oft leader Bill states that there are 7000 users of Windows 98. How many users of Windows 2000 are there? Let's see. The number of Win98 versus Win2k posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Win2k users. Win95 posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Win2k posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Windows 95. A recent article put Windows XP at about 80 percent of the PC market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 WinXP users. This is consistent with the number of Windows XP Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of abysmal sales and so on, IBM sold its PC business to China. Now the IBM PC is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that the PC has steadily declined in market share. The PC is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the PC is to survive at all it will be among computer dilettante dabblers. The PC continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the PC is dead.

Fact: the PC is dying

Speaking of 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the only way to kill off 3.5 floppes is make Cheap Thumb drives in the shape of 3.5 floppies that go into USB ports that look like 3.5 floppy drives. People just cant move away from those damn things.

Interesting.

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

"argues that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come."

... while we're choked with DRM that phones home to make sure that we only use our computers for what we paid for, and that all the installed programs are owned by us.

Revolutionary?

That's a pretty big problem.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Only problem is when the main servers go down you're killing not just one user but a whole organization.

Uh, that's a pretty big problem.

But then again, a single point of failure usually is.

Re:That's a pretty big problem.

[iabervon]

Well, with a bit of replication, your servers aren't all going to go down together due to random failures. And the same sorts of flaws that take down all of the servers would take down all of the desktops and be more of a pain anyway.

Re:That's a pretty big problem.

[Taladar]

A rat in the server room would take down all of the workstations?

Re:That's a pretty big problem.

[flosofl]

I hope all your replicated servers aren't in the same location. That'd be... well, not smart.

Re:That's a pretty big problem.

[EnderWiggnz]

most likely, your users are already relying on netowrk resources for productivity, anyway.

and why in the world would you lose a server? these things should never fall over. ever.

Re:That's a pretty big problem.

[Kent Recal]

Also all server rooms, ofcourse, need at least one functional mousetrap.

Re:That's a pretty big problem.

[SA Stevens]

Whoah! Now you're changed the scenario, from 'one big server' to 'a whole cluster of redundant servers.'

Why not say that up front?

Article text in case of slashdotting

[operagost]

PCs dead? No way! Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah ...

...

DRM

...

WINDOWS R00LZ YEW FOOLZ!

...

BUY MORE MICROSOFT SOFTWARE!

...

YOU'RE ALL THIEVES!

...

In conclusion, nothing will change. Nothing ever does! The internet is a fad and 640KB is enough for everyone!

Has to be said . . .

[scottennis]

I for one welcome our PC overlords.

Re:Has to be said . . .

[indy_Muad'Dib]

[x]George Orwell reference [x]Welcoming the overlords [x]Jedi mind tricks [ ]Tinfoil Hats [ ]Soviet Russia [ ]questionable business plans [ ]Slashdot haiku [ ]Dupe 3 months from now [ ]In Korea only old people [ ]FUD Theres alot more left to say, you guys are slacking off.

Really, should we trust him?

[pg110404]

After all, 640k ought to be enough for anyone.

However, until we can figure out a way to get a wireless transceiver implanted directly in our brain and we ourselves become a super duper wireless PC, then the PC is here to stay.

Web-app backlash is just beginning

[tentimestwenty]

Am I the only one who longs for the day when the PC was "locked down". Everything that was on my computer was something I put on there, I organized it how I wanted and when something was out of place or malfunctioning it was easy to locate and fix. It was like Zen for computing.

Now, I just get the feeling that I'm less productive. I've got documents on multiple computers with different versions of apps on all of them. I tend to save info in empty e-mails as opposed to on sticky notes and my address book is Canada411.com. In short, there's no real designated place for things and most of my time is spent finding things that I used to be forced to organize.

The massive capability of internet resources and web aware apps encourages one to keep things as snippets but there's less and less to tie all this together. The Zen of computing is gone in my opinion and it's only going to get worse when our documents are stored remotely.

I think Apple has the basis of the real next revolution in computing - Universal Smart Sync. All your addresses and info and documents has to be automatically pulled together across all the networks you use and imbued with some kind of physical order. And not "wizard style" fake order, real honest to goodness System 7 physicality.

Why automate Windows?

[CDarklock]

Here on my desk I have a nice, friendly, responsive Windows machine. Over in a high-availability datacenter hooked into fat network pipes, I have three Linux servers. Why, exactly, do I need to automate something on my Windows box? I can much more easily tell my desktop PC to send the data to a Linux box, which I can script like there's no tomorrow. The results can then be sent back to me, and I can look at them right here on my Windows desktop. So what's the problem? Just like when I'm logged into my Linux machine and I get an attachment in MS Word format, I simply forward the mail and turn to my Windows machine to open it. And if I ever see the need, I'll happily drop a Mac on the desktop next to my Windows box. We're NETWORKED, people. There's simply no reason to pursue homogeneity anymore.

Re:Why automate Windows?

[argent]

Why, exactly, do I need to automate something on my Windows box?

Because you want to do it more than once.

I can much more easily tell my desktop PC to send the data to a Linux box, which I can script like there's no tomorrow. The results can then be sent back to me, and I can look at them right here on my Windows desktop. So what's the problem?

OK, tell me how to automatically send my timecard data from SAP to Linux (or OS X, or Interix running on the same computer... you don't need a Linux box in the loop to see the problem), and send a summary through Lotus Notes to my boss, and do it automatically every Friday whether I'm logged in or not.

Re:Why automate Windows?

[mwood]

If I want to have a weekly job to grub through the Windows event log, find interesting stuff, make a list, and email it to me (over on the Linux system in my office) I kind of think it's going to have to be done by the Windows box.

I could have that designed, built, tested, documented, packaged, and scheduled in an hour on Linux. I just spent the better part of *two days* figuring out how to do it on Windows. But now it's done and I can go do other stuff and just wait for the emails to arrive.

Re:Why automate Windows?

[smoker2]

Ever heard of elegant solutions ?
Wasting time and bandwidth to perform something which should be possible on 1 machine is a problem in my book.
not to mention the extra power /components / hassle.
I thought the subject was the PC (singular) ?

Re:Why automate Windows?

[CDarklock]

> Ever heard of elegant solutions ?

This IS an elegant solution. Here is data on a machine that is hard to script. There is a machine that is easy to script. I need to write a script to analyse this data. Which is more elegant: sending the data to the other machine, or scripting the existing one? Looks pretty obvious to me.

Bandwidth is cheap. Machines are cheap. Programmers scripting an architecture they don't like, on the other hand -- that's expensive.

Whining about how hard it is to do things also tends to waste valuable time you could spend doing it.

Maybe not dead...but dying

[IdJit]

With the advent of more and more mobile technology, the PC is certainly on it's way through a transition where only the most useful and efficient applications will survive the evolution. Personally, I think that the PC (more specifically, the MS-based PC, which is I think what Bill *really* means here) has soooo many layers of problems that it will end up eventually killing itself off.

Bill maybe right.

[certel]

"and argues that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come." I totally agree. Wow I can't believe I said that. Advancements to personal computing are only touching the bottom of there full potential. The PC still has too many moving parts.

Ears?

[sczimme]

I just read that so called op-ed piece and I think my ears may be bleeding from the sheer amount of marketing speak.

Next time don't read the article aloud - just move your lips as you go.

HTH. HAND. :-)

'rich tools'

[soricine]

Is it just me, or does 'rich tools' sound like euphemism for 'bloat'? Should a software tool be 'rich'? Shouldn't it be 'smart'? I'm starting to suspect this might be at the root of my objection to a lot of Microsoft's products.

Don't know whether to laugh or cry

[wcrowe]

Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.

You mean Microsoft would grind to a halt.

Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would slingshot themselves to mach speed in terms of productivity.

Fake Left, Go Right

[Anonymous Coward]

This is vaporware type strategy announcement. If the PC is so important, why has MSFT spent so much time and effort devloping "outlook live"?

Analogies

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I never thought of businesses as bloated meat-eaters and pasty game players as algae (aka "scum") eaters but now that you mention it...

You insensitive clod!

[ggvaidya]

You made Bill Gates cry ...

Re:You insensitive clod!

[Non-linear Thinker]

Yeah - as Liberace said "I cried all the way to the bank"...

What exactly is a 'thin client' model then?

[hey!]

Usually, we mean something that just handles display -- but then do you count a network booted as thin or thick? Technically, I guess, it's a thick client, but it seems to me to combine the benefits of both thin and thick clients.

I think it would be cool to have a solution where you have diskless workstations that boot off a USB key you assign to the users. You'd assign it to them, and if the PC ever got broken, they'd just plug into a different one.

Re:What exactly is a 'thin client' model then?

[danheskett]

I think it would be cool to have a solution where you have diskless workstations that boot off a USB key you assign to the users. You'd assign it to them, and if the PC ever got broken, they'd just plug into a different one.
This isn't too far from the truth. Imagine if you could get a USB-style interface that was as fast as your internal bus. A "PC" could be nothing more than a docking station. A 2GB of flash RAM, 1GB of DDR RAM, and a compact low-power CPU and all of the sudden everyone could bring their whole PCs with them.

Re:What exactly is a 'thin client' model then?

[EnderWiggnz]

first, network booting is a horrible idea that should die a violent death. its unstable and generally a pain in teh ass to administer and support.

local flash is so damn cheap these days, that it really makes 0 sense to cobble together some god-awful TFTP solution.

the system on a USB idea is a neat idea, but with some limitations. You would not want your "core" OS on the Key, but would want data, and personal applications.

Re:What exactly is a 'thin client' model then?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, who wants to start a dev on this?

The HW is available now... at 18MB/sRd-15MB/sWr even.

I think my boss'd buy one :)

Re:What exactly is a 'thin client' model then?

[timmarhy]

how is network booting a bad idea. if i want to change the configuration all i do is change the boot image. with your flash card idea you need to pyshically go around changing cards, which is a shit idea. it sounds a lot like many people on here stick to crappy admin practises in order to maintain a certain level of pointless busy work to justify their jobs.

Re:What exactly is a 'thin client' model then?

[EnderWiggnz]

you have a central administration tool to update the small flash-storage-device (not necessarily compact flash, btw... whatever gave you that idea?)

the flash disk would be sufficiently small enough, around 32-128 MB's, depending on built-in-functionality reqs, that the bandwidth required to update them would be sufficiently small enough, and less than netbooting every time you boot.

netbooting is a horrible, horrible idea, and i have deployed a silly amount of netboot seats.

Re:What exactly is a 'thin client' model then?

[Fjornir]

netbooting is a horrible, horrible idea

My god, you're kidding, right? The last lab I maintained was a testlab for small clusters -- we had three classes of Dell servers, two classes of HP servers, and five classes of desktops. Total we had just short of 1200 systems. Every re-imaging task started with a netboot.. We could provision a system straight out of the box all the way to a full server and in the pool for allocation to the next test request just by plugging it in.

What's the problem with netbooting??

Re:What exactly is a 'thin client' model then?

[EnderWiggnz]

first: i am a software engineer with a thin client vendor.

sounds like you're netbooting into a system-recovery tool, not into a running system. netbooting you're way makes more sense than netbooting into a running system.

we've tried implementations
of netbooting/peer-booting, and have always run away, screaming from the experience. i have a large installed base of netbooted thin clients, that still needs care and feeding.

how do we configure these units to point to the correct boot server? either we ask end-users to grunt through their network card setup, use a BootPROM on the device, or have a small ramdisk on flash, to let the end user configure the device.

the first is unwiedly for most users, and many admins, boot PROM's can be unforgivably picky regarding which OSs they'll let themselves load, and the third way still requires some local flash space.

how do we boot? we need to pull down a massive kernel, with all drivers, particulaly network drivers, built into the kernel. what if we're trying to do this on a Wireless network? what if we're trying to do this on a Token rung network? what if you're stuck with a god damn 10base2 network on a naval destroyer?

what about the rest of the root filesystem? NFS mounted? do we instead pull down tar's or cram package, and spew them into a large ramdisk?

how do we provide persistent application data? exported home directories? local flash?

how do we minimize network traffic? pulling down a huge ramdisk kills your load time, but once its down, you can run pretty much locally. NFS (more or less) relies on constant no-collision network connectivity, but provides a much faster bootup time.

how do you deal with device files? certain NFS server dont support these. certain nfs servers dont support SETUID bits.

some nfs servers dont support case sensitive filenames.

is the server that you're booting off of supposed to be usefull for anything else?

what happens when the entire site goes kablooie, and all peer boot clients simultaneously boot? can your sysinit handle collisions and dropped packets?

i do understand the first-look benefits of netbooting, but from experience, a generalized netbooting solution is a huge headache, and not worth the time, as flash is so god damn cheap.

I'm not dead yet!

[fizban]

"I think I'll go for a walk!"

Re:I'm not dead yet!

[grumling]

You're not fooling anyone, you know.

Re:Just One Question...

[ad0gg]

3.5 Floppy is dead. Macs don't have them, Dell's don't come with them in default configuration.

The PC is the "Mainframe" of the Networked Home

[Quirk]

mp3s, dvds, gamepads, cell phones, all peripherals are/will be the "thin clients" of what is now the PC which already has the power of early mainframes. Household appliances will either connect directly to the net or for security and other reasons connect through what is now the PC which will archive and update

The good old days...

[Spaceman40]

Anyone else remember having a computer 10, 20 years ago that could do plain text editing? I could drag out my old 80486, put a scaled-down version of *nix on it, and I've got [insert editor here]. Sad that people spend $400 for the Professional version of MS Office just for some fonts.

Eh. To the point: I get 15 thin clients (note how Gates calls them 'dumb terminals'? synonyms might mean the same thing, but the connotations are different...) at about $100 each, one central server for them at about $2000, and I'm out $3500.

I get 15 PCs, think around $1000 each (or even $300, as Gates seems to think), and I'm out $4500 ($300/pc) to $15,000 ($1000/pc).

For low-performance tasks (office, solitaire, etc.), thin clients make a lot of sense. For high-performance tasks, PCs make a lot of sense.

It's ALIVE!

[Eternal Annoyance]

No, computer. You can't it my foot.

Imminent death of PC reported. News at 11!

[GeorgeMcBay]

If I had a dollar for every time some company or news organization predicted everyone was going to go out and replace their PCs with Network Computers or JavaStations or XTerminals I'd be richer than Bill Gates.

Various folks have predicted this since the early 1980s and it still hasn't happened and won't happen. This isn't to say that there aren't enviornments that are best served with such setups, but in the general case, the PC is still king and will be for the foreseeable future.

Bill's Crystal Ball

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn,

Just when I was starting to enjoy my PC, Billy had to go and say it was going to be around for a long time...

Based on his previous predictions, the PC will be dead in a week :)

Re:Bill's Crystal Ball

[IdJit]

At first I thought the title was "Billy Crystal's Ball" BWAHAHA..Haha...Ha...heh...hmm.

Um, okay. Mod me down.

Why would anyone ask?

[ShineyMcShine]

It's like asking, "Is sex dead?".

PC is not dead!

[cabazorro]

It's just pining for the fjords.

No, seriously, nothing is anywere close to replace the PC's so why to ask the question in the first place!?
Is an article abouth nothing!
So why do you read it???
Because is in slashdot.

Evolving Ecosystem in Redmond!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmm...

Bill likes the idea of predators like viruses in the ecosystem of the web... It has led to the evolution of stronger programmers.

We should do the same for their fat little microSOFT bodies!

This can be easily actualized at the redmond campus ecosystem by allowing packs of hyenas to roam free around "Lake Bill" and the surrounding habitat!

This will result in much stronger programmers!

I agree, sort of...

[rastin]

Bill says: 'Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.'

I think that is because Windows is a GUI, Windows development consists of writting GUIs and applications that try to 'click the right button' suck. So you see automation to the point of not needing button clickers is a doomed failure... As long as you are using M$ products that is.

Bill's record

[saltydogdesign]

Bill doesn't have a terribly good record of predicting the future, but you know, even a broken watch is right twice a day.

Great post!

[serutan]

Wow, thanks for taking the time to post this info. I'm interested in doing the same type of thing. Can you give some specs on your laptops?

Re:Great post!

[eno2001]

There are three laptops in total (one supplied by work and the other two are mine).

1. Two of the laptops (mine) are old Toshibas that cost about $150 each
2. The work laptop is an HP Compaq nx9010

All of them run a stripped down version of RedHat 9 with just enough support for X window, Gnome Panel, VNC4, ESD, and OpenSSH. Of course there's more stuff in there and I havent' worked hard to lighten it that much, but it's just enough to fit on those small HDs. The Toshibas are using D-Link 802.11b NICs and the Compaq has a built in Broadcom Wireless NIC that isn't supoprted in Linux. To get the Broadcom to work, I needed to use NDISWrapper which loads the Windows driver into the Linux kernel.

Billy Borg

[FudRucker]

RE: ["Bill Gates has an op-ed in this morning's BW Online, in which he responds to the magazine's question Is the PC dead? with a resounding "No!" and argues that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come."]

i wonder if Bill Bates was thinking of Linux gaining market share???

Possibly not dead.

[Nize]

However, if it appears dead, it may be running Windows, according to emperical evidence.

I hope I don't see its name in the paper...

[renderhead]

...in the obituary,
'cause that would mean that it's dead.

The PC is not dead.
I'm so glad the PC's not dead.

Hmm where is the solitaire Players

[Anonymous Coward]

If I see something like this I uninstall sol.exe it stops it. Just call me a BOFH with a business point.

Luddites?

[mario_grgic]

Complaining about too much power? I for one crave for more power and not only for my PC, but I want more inteligent home devices (from TV to microwave) with universal (common) interfaces all networked together.

Take the Microsoft out the PC

[hcob$]

and it's amazing the productivity increase....

An article I won't read

[bonch]

This time, I'm not even planning to read TFA. Scanning over it, Bill Gates loves to bloviate about nothing. If you saw the CES2005 video, he just sits there talking about photos and communication over and over again, like they're something new. He sounds like an old out-of-touch businessman trying hard to sound in touch by mentioning "digital lifestyle" over and over so the PHBs can think he's a visionary. Contrast to someone like Steve Jobs at Macworld who personally demos his company's products to applause instead of talking about digital photos and digital music like they're something new.

Anyone remember Gates' book from the mid-90s about the future of computing that didn't mention the word "Internet" once? It was later amended to add a chapter that mentioned it. Bill Gates didn't even see the Internet coming.

Gates is simply not a proven visionary in this department. A ringing endorsement that the PC is not dead pretty much signals to me that it just might be.

No, 10 years ago....

[Anonymous Coward]

> Try opening Word, Excel, seven or eight instances of IE or Mozilla, AND an email client, and even the much-scorned 3GHz PC w/512mb doesn't seem quite as fast anymore.

As I type this:
8 mozilla 'instances'
1 email client
Star Office:
1 2-page document
2 spreadsheets of unknown size
1 xv w/ a boatload of images cached
1 mplayer paused in a .8G mpeg
several nfs mounts in and out
unkown number of xterms....

on a 700MHz Athalon w/ less than .5G of memory. Yes, SO and Mozilla will thrash as I switch between the 2, but what was your point again?

A good start

[Roadkills-R-Us]

I've been all over the map on this one. At one point we had a main server, and the other systems were just X servers. As things got busier, I went to a full install on the other systems, but the main server is still a file server (as well as print server, scanner home, etc). Now that the kids are mostly not home, I may be going back to the first model.

Neither is purely thin client, but neither follows the Windows models real closely, either (although with file sharing Windows now follows the latter model!) Even with the current model (standalones + NIS/NFS) some apps run on the main server, so it's sorta thin-client-ish. Whatever, it's all just distributed computing in my book.

"The network *is* the computer" - Bill Joy.

I'm running Linux, but it would work exactly the same with any *nix.

I expect us to always have PCs in the house. The majority of them won't make Mr. Gates happy, but they're still PCs!

Don't Run windows.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dual 1g chips on a board with video and sound onboard for less than the windows licence. Note this does not require a harddrive it since the on board network card will boot from network. DRBL is great for this since the programs are running on the local machine and everything stored in the server.

Licence cost $0 Motherboard with onboard processors $250 or less case $65 or less ram $100 or less Monitor $95 or less Keyboard and Mouse $15 dollars ie a total of $525 for a workstation place. Boy are microsoft licences Expencive. Install 10 of these machines and the saving in licence cost pays for the switch cables and server to run this another 2 and you pay for the ups to keep the server up.

Note user don't need cdroms drives or floppy drives everyone users usb keys. Less things to break great with a pack of vandals. Note this is also a small work space setup.

Note I did not include the reduction in cost for each machine not having a hard drive and not missing any data on backups. Note this really adds up. More effective use of hardware.

Re:It's pretty sad...

[rob_squared]

...when you have to explain a joke.

What he's saying is that Gates being negative about PCs would be like fishermen saying that eating fish was bad for your health. Get it?!

And from the other side of his mouth...

[faxafloi]

"Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt."

"Now, let's talk about Web Services!"

... that blue screen usually dissapear after rest

[rob_squared]

"usually"

Take the "Personal" out of Business

[The Angry Mick]

Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt

I seriously doubt this.

One of the problems with "Business computing" is that it's become far too personal. While a business user may want the latest, greatest version of Webshots/RealAudio/Screen Saver of the Month, they don't actually need any of the "personalised" touches to perform their basic job.

System administration is hard enough with just operating system(1) and hardware variables(2) mucking things up. Adding personalization privileges to a few hundred end users, while nice and sweet on an emotional level, quite frankly causes more problems than a business should have to deal with.

It is completely uneccesssary for a user to be able to spend hours online looking for the perfect wallpaper. Equally unecessary for things like Solitaire or Minesweeper. While I laud Microsoft for introducing millions of people to computers (thus creating my field), I really hate the fact that the touchy-feely approach to user hand holding is the largest contributing factor to a slew of problems like viruses, spyware and spam. I used to love my job, but now, it's become just that: a job. A job where a significant portion of my day is spent explaining to users things like, "Just because the flash games website demands ShockwaveX, doesn't mean I'll be making a 30 mile trip to upgrade the version you currently have installed."

1) Whichever f*cker thought it'd be a bright idea to have Windows do a scheduled task scan of the entire network EVERY TIME Windows Explorer launches should be shot . . . multiple times.

2) Two words: "DLL Hell".

The PC IS dead,

[quarkscat]

or will be soon! Uncle (Borg)Bill is wrong, and he knows he is wrong. The problem is, MSFT has created a monster of their own doing, and it WILL conflict with their current "business" model. On one hand, MSFT does (truly) want all its customers to upgrade to Longhorn (or at least to XPSP2 from Win95/98/ME/NT4/2K). They derive profit from selling OS upgrades. For very many computer users this also means purchasing a new more powerful computer to run that shiny new OS on. However, MSFT's "Palladium" (eg. Restricted Rights Computer) initiative WILL drive many customers away from the Wintel platform, because non-corporate customers expect to be able to do anything they like with the hardware THEY buy. And MSFT is at the mercy of the large broadband ISPs when it comes to pushing non-corporate customers into the internet enabled thin client heavily DRMed metered use that MSFT has seen as "their answer" to software piracy issues. Without the widespread (nearly universal) broadband access to MSFT's Application servers, their whole push into onerous License6, EULA changes, and DRMed software updates will fail to crush much piracy.

The marketplace is not ready for the widespread adoption of MSFT-centric thin client computing ala WebTV due to the internet infrastructure's abysmal broadband access. The non-corporate MSFT customer had been in a tizzy over new hardware costs that include the "Palladium" technology. And MSFT's corporate customers are too busy weighing the cost of new hardware & software to protect their "secrets" from Oxley-Sarbanes regs, versus offshore outsourcing the whole thing (and the probability of losing control of their business).

MSFT has painted themselves into the proverbial corner, and Uncle (Borg)Bill's trying to keep the troops happy while they watch the paint dry.

The PC of today is the server of tomorrow?

[neonfrog]

So many thoughts, mostly generated from /. reading:

* Bittorrent -- while you may use a thin client in your house to move around apps, the valuable data that you choose to share lives on a server. We like BT *BECAUSE* it's a great decentralized distribution tool that needs an internal (to your home) server because of our own requirements -- we don't want to log into some corporate server to get our media/ISO everytime. We like the fact that we can serve others and thus get served better because of it. Why would that change?

* How do we work when the server is down? By having a workstation (emphasis on the work).

* Centralization = single point of failure. Redundant servers = same thing as more workstations. I know 2 servers can replace X^N workstations, but the point here is that a decentralized workstation system is a bunch of "servers."

* Laptops. Offline. 'Nuff said.

I'm sure you guys can think of more reasons.

What, no Web?

[TwobyTwo]

Anyone else think it's striking that in looking back over 20+years of personal computing, the man who coined the term "Information at Your Fingertips" had nothing significant so say about the impact of either the Internet or the Web?

Re:What, no Web?

[MrP-(at work)]

didn't he also call the web a fad that wouldnt last more than a few years?

Oh the day!

[hanshotfirst]

"...and argues that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come."

Those revolutionary days when Windows will run without bogging down the latest 128-bit 1.21THz processor and not crash.

Local powerful CPU still good for grid

[Krellan]

Yes, the primary reason for the desirability of thin clients in the workplace is their lack of an administration burden.

Being able to save money by purchasing less powerful hardware isn't even close: over the useful life of the system, the cost of administration more than outweighs the one-time expense of the hardware. In fact, bizarre CPU-less hardware (some dedicated thin client "terminals") can cost *more* than an equivalent standard PC, because of lack of an economy of scale!

Most corporations just ride the price-performance curve and purchase whatever standard PC is currently in the middle of the market. These days, that gets a decently powerful CPU. Thin clients become thin due to the use of network booting and non-local file storage, not due to the lack of a CPU! When properly configured, a standard PC makes a good thin client.

What would be a wonderful use of resources is to form some kind of cluster/grid out of all of the thin clients! The powerful local CPU could then be used for jobs that are submitted over the network, giving a powerful large cluster for heavy computation.

The user would use the PC as a thin client, running remote applications, and any unused local CPU power would still go to good use, powering the cluster! To me, this seems like a win-win situation....

Re:Local powerful CPU still good for grid

[arkanes]

Places like Pixar leverage this by pulling unused PCs into the renderfarm, using standard distributed tools. The problem with your scenario is that it's wasteful - think about it. The most usefull part of the "cluster" that PC could be powering is the applications that are running on it! The problem is that administering a network of independent machines is hard. The answer is not, as the naive and stereotypically anal-retentive admin might say, "pull everything back to the server". The answer is more and better remote administration and security tools. In reality, most of these tools exist today. Admins, as a rule, don't leverage them properly.

[OT] Re:zerg

[Lord Omlette]

Why DO you title all your posts 'zerg'? Recognition thing? Or some deeper meaning I don't understand?

Actually it turnsout that "Zerg" is German for "Zerg".

Re:[OT] Re:zerg

[Koiu Lpoi]

No kidding. You're right. You don't disguise your craziness at all. I like that. Still makes no sense.

Hallelujah!

[Anonymous Coward]

The PC is not dead nor will ever be dead. I don't understand where some of these people are coming from. The PC will always be here, but they might give it a fancy new name. It's the #1 device of today and tomorrow and forever.

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this another one of those dumb arguments just to aggravate the IT industry?

Like Carr's stupid argument
"Does IT matter?"

why, oh why?

[lordsid]

Seriously why do people ask bill gates these questions, he's always wrong and this is something he should actually be right about.

He didn't say anything

[mferrare]

Not much of a rebuttal if you ask me. No answer to points made in the original article such as waste of CPU power, use of basic applications and security issues. He just says 'it's a cog'! Ha!

One interesting thing he did was to call PDA's and phones PC's. They are not PC's. You can't argue that PC's are a 'cog' because PDAs and phones are. PDAs and especially phones are 'cogs' in the information delivery of the future. But they are not PC's.

Personally I agree with the first article. He makes an excellent point in that PC's are the centre of home computing but just a nuisance in business. They are under-utilised and take too much effort to support for what they provide.

I'm sure a lot of readers have or do work in large enterprises. What the original article said rings true. The applications you use on a PC are basically e-mail, MS-Office, browsing and helpdesk. IMHO it's Office that keeps us on PC's.

Mark

But how are they to copy the DVD they rented...

[Anonymous Coward]

from netflix or blockbusters, when the original dvd used a slightly oversized 9GB dvd, and the person copying the dvd wants to make it fit on a standard $0.50 blank DVD-r ;) hell yeah, 4GHz, 160GB, 19" (preferably 16:9 ratio, for enhanced DVD viewing) LCD monitor, Everyone is gonna want one ;) oh wait, the average $499 POS CompLusa Pc can do all that, and pretty good, if it doesn't fall apart on you in 10 seconds.
And why do you need the ability to copy dvds at the office? you ask? well, hell, instead of 'borrowing' bob's copy of the lord of the rings, you can just rip n burn a copy and hand it back to him at lunch ;)

PC is not dead, I'm so glad the PC is not dead

[pharwell]

Just the claps! Keep it rolling!

duh

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, that's like saying vehicles are dead.

whee offtopic

[SweetAndSourJesus]

I find your weblog delicious and would like to subscribe to your news feed.

On-topic: Uhm...those are some good points there.

Re:whee offtopic

[Theaetetus]

[giggle]

I should probably get around to updating it.
My next step (already planning) is to figure out how to grill a sponge cake.

Ever had a Cool Dog (tm)? Vanilla ice cream, squeezed into hot-dog shape, in a sponge cake bun, then topped with assorted toppings - red strawberry sauce for the ketchup, etc. I bet I could set one on fire.

-T

Actually not helpful at all,

[Anonymous Coward]

since all those images that are actual zerg, are hydralisk. Actual zerglings look more like this

Re:Actually not helpful at all,

[databyss]

except that zerg is the race... hydralisks are zerg, so are mutalisks... and even zerglings.

Yes, they do

[Anonymous Coward]

Thin clients are the vaporware of the past decade (and beyond). HP and others have been trying to push businesses back into a mainframe mentality of having 'dumb' terminals at the desk, and for administrative reasons there are definitely major advantages (mainly ease of administration and improved standardization).

However, back when I was testing this in '96, hard drives and memory were major expenses. Then the prices of computers continued to fall, making thin clients not quite cost effective, and not quite worth implimenting. And these days they arent, and computers continue getting less expensive.

The PC isnt going to die, the PC is the future. The TV may die, and the stereo may die, but the PC is just going to absorb more functions, much like Cartman's Dawson's Creek trapper keeper.

All I can say is...

[PsychicX]

Most corporate networks, particularly the smaller ones that are in non-tech-sector companies, tend to fall apart regularly. This does a fair bit of damage to the people running workstations, but if those were thin clients, more than a few businesses would grind to a halt.

Essential tool???

[Ogman]

I've been trying to use a Tablet PC to take notes for a month now. All I do is send it to the repair shop and try to recover notes that it has lost. Somehow that just doesn't strike me as an essential tool. Technology failures lead to less people interested in using technology. Myself, I'm going back to pen and paper technology that WORKS!

I swear i would have said the exact opposite

[Anonymous Coward]

...that windows is built for business, and (sorry have to) macs are built for home users. Maybe it's that windows can't decide? My argument rests on the opinion that regardless of how well it integrates technologically, *psycologically* windows is quite directed to the business manager, behold:

Basic psychology, straight lines conjure images of swift function, smooth shapes provide comfort of use and ease.

Windows uses a philosophy of stripped functionality so that the user is not distracted by anything "fun" during their job. The computer experience is only as rich as the *applications* you have at your disposal -- we can agree that a basic install of windows doesn't provide much entertainment, or usable anything. A manager or business purchaser might approve that their employees aren't having any extra fun with the OS.

Macs have a tremendously more powerful program set out of the box, and their smooth and colorful environment encourages users to be comfortable and look around. It doesn't necessarily *distract* users, but it does let them feel free to look around and try the merchandise.

For these reasons, I would (and have) said that Macs are the quintensential personal (for use at home) computer, while windows computers are aimed at business and rarely, if ever, care about a home users' experience. DRM, et al, also go to show the wintel philosophy.

Just wild to hear your version. Any comments?

Hate to say it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lap tops are catching up... My 64 bit AMD with a gig of ram does very well in every game I have tried with it including Battlefield 1942 Secret Weapons of WWII no studdering at all and graphics maxxed... I do think though that the laptops of the future will need more aggressive video cards to keep up maybe one with 256 megs of dedicated ram. Only problem I seen with my laptop is heat, if your going to game on it spend the extra $30 for a cooler pad, if your just doing your TPS reports you don't need one but for gaming a definite must. To be truthfull I would rather have my laptop any day compared to any desktop I don't care if the desk top was one of alienwares best and cost 10K, Laptops will doom the desktop soon, because you get more then a computer. Its a portable DVD player, burner, with a bitchin screen that puts the new PSP to shame when you are gaming on the go, so Bill I hate to say it, (actully I love to say it), Like so many times before Your wrong... Windows 3.1-98 it was all shitty... Only reason it sold because it became the standard that so many dumbass companies went to it, for no one else is compatable and even some of your older software is incompatable with itself... so yea the desktop is soon to be dead!

Rather a silly forced choice

[smchris]

Of course the PC isn't "dead". But balance might suggest that a lot more secretaries could do fine with thin clients.

Same with the home. Power users will always want power machines but a thin client might just be the thing to finally kick start that crucial recipe terminal in the kitchen.

Take the personal out of computing

[ewe2]

...and Microsoft would grind to a halt.

This is just a sound-bite to talk up MSFT stock. It isn't even related to the article. Bill is paranoid that someone will think of a use for computers that Microsoft can't control.

Bill does not believe this

[edbarbar]

If Bill really believed there was such a huge amount of innovation left on the PC, then why did he give back $9,000,000,000 dollars to investors? That could have been used for all the innovation he believes is left to do.

dept to be renamed...

[tfulton2]

... to the dept of "I can still bite you!" This story was erroneously misfiled, and editors will have the correct label applied shortly. Also, those responsible for the error have been sacked.

William H Gates III

[camcloud1]

Does he always refer to himself like that or just when he writes an article for BW?

Any hosted rdesktop out there ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like a lot of folks I drift between several PCs during the week all I really need is
firefox and OOo

So I'm wondering if there are any companies currently offering hosted X or rdesktop ....

Sort of like the Google rumor....

Webmail + Cal + File Store + Word(thing) + Excel(thing)

Sure I could set this up on my own box, but I'd be happy to pay $50/year to have it done elegantly by someone else with remote backup.

A google for hosted citrix and hosted rdesktop didn't turn up much.

I for one welcome the demise of our PC overlords

they'll be too busy...

[CarrionBird]

Asking, "do you want fries with that?"

Re:What Gates meant

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha loser, enjoy posting at -1 by default! About fucking time my modbomb paid off. Cutting and pasting from journals will only make you look smart for so long, and then people figure out what a dumbass you are.