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New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback
One of the seemingly eternal questions in managing personal computers within organizations is whether to centralize computing power (making it easy to upgrade or secure The One True Computer, and its data), or push the power out toward the edges, where an individual user isn't crippled because a server at the other side of the network is down, or if the network itself is unreliable. Despite the ever-increasing power of personal computers, the New York Times reports that the concept of making individual users' screens portals (smart ones) to bigger iron elsewhere on the network is making a comeback.
When you have customers with thick clients, sell em thin ones cause they are "better-er".
When you have flogged off all of your customers with a thin client, the new thing is a "better-er-er" thick client.
Whole thing sounds like very simple 101 style marketing. Why try to sell someone something they have? Convince them what you have is better. Total no-brainer imo.
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My clients are all obese, and show no intentions of slimming down; what am I doing wrong?
No, but I did throw granola at a deaf person once
Which is why its not a great idea putting mission critical thin clients across a WAN
Though having worked for several years in large corporate environments (and their associated love for citrix farms), I would observe
- WAN accelerators work. A riverbed (mind you at ~$50,000AUD a pop it ain't exactly cheap) will make a 2M link seem like LAN speeds for the protocols its optimised for. Depending on cost of bandwidth....
- Consolidation does not have to go overboard. If there are at least a few hundred users, it can be cost efficient to run a local server. Most network problems that are not a result of a bungled change / cabling stuffup are WAN.
- Government network? good luck with that buddy!
- The bean counters find it very easy to quantify the cost 'savings' and push their agenda as such. However for your potential losses due to downtime caused by network outages.... heck the fortune 500 I am contracted to presently doesn't even have a method for estimating the dollar cost of downtime, let alone a method for estimating the amount of downtime likely to occur (needless to say they also choose the cheapest carrier, which has a ridiculous inability to meet SLA, and then consolidate like mad to place even more reliance on the WAN).
Like most things in IT there is no silver bullet or magic formula, each case needs to be judged on their own merit.
And on a side note, given how much hardware costs have dropped and the fact that user requirements have remained relatively static (i.e. most generic office workers are still using the same software as 4 years ago), how hard can it be to embed the email client (with local cache so they can at least view emails they already downloaded) and office suite on the thin client itself so at least they can keep working on documents?
1. Actually, regardless of whether they are making a comeback or not, or what their advantages and disadvantages may be, this is probably just a PR story. Just like the "The Suit Is Back!" that got traced back to a PR agency a couple of years ago.
PR loves to masquerade as news because it bypasses your BS filter. An ad for Men's Warehouse suits gets looked over, a piece of news that you won't get hired unless you wear a suit, tries to replace your premises with theirs and let you take a leap to the "I must buy a suit" conclusion. Or better yet, to the even better conclusion, "I must only hire people in suits 'cause everyone else is doing it." There are a lot of sheeple out there who only need a "The Herd Is That Way -->" sign to willingly enter someone's pen and be sheared like "everyone else".
For anyone who's not sheeple, this is a non-story. Whether _you_ need a server instead of PCs or not, depends on what _your_ needs are and what _your_ employees are doing. Use your own head.
The only ones who need an "everyone else is doing X" story are those who have to follow a herd to feel secure.
Hence, the love PR has for this kind of story.
2. Over-simplifications like "all they need is internet, database access, and word processing" were false when arguing why grandma should only need an old 486, and tend to be just as false for a company. So you'll have to do some analysis if for a particular company that is indeed true, or just glossing over what's really going on. (Or even wishful thinking by some IT guy who feels his job would sound more important if he was overseeing a server.)
E.g., a lot of companies have salesmen who go with a laptop to various customers to give a presentation and try to win a contract. Are you ready for the case when that guy you're trying to sell insurance doesn't have internet to connect to your server via VPN? Are you sure that those server side apps' files can be converted flawlessly to MS Office or whatever those sales guys have on their laptop?
It's just one example where goimng, "bah, they only use database apps and word processing" is glossing over a more complex problem.
3. The argument for saving costs is a good one, and far from me to advise wasting money. But you have to be sure that you're actually _saving_ money across the organisation, not just saving $1000 in the narrow slice you see, at the cost of causing $1,000,000 to be lost in workarounds and lost productivity somewhere else. Entirely too much "cost cutting" lately is the latter kind of bullshit theatre.
E.g., if someone costs you $100,000 per year -- and I don't mean just wage, but also electricity costs, building rent, etc -- saving $1000 is nullified if it drops their productivity by as little as 1%. Saving a few hours per year of an IT guy's work can be a very bad trade off, if it costs that guy as little as 5 minutes total per 8h work day to put up with the quirks and delays of the centralized system. (480 minutes a day, times 1% is 4.8 minutes.) It can add up very easily to that. It only takes wasting 1 second per form through some web-app instead of letting that guy massage the data locally in Excel or Access(*), to add up to more than that in a day. A close enough approximation can very easily be approximative enough to actually turn the whole thing into a loss.
(*) ... or whatever F/OSS equivalents you prefer. This is not MS advocacy, so fill in the blanks with whatever you prefer.
And as you move higher up the totem pole, things get even funkier. If a salesman is doing contracts worth millions of dollars with those presentation, I hope you better save a _lot_ with that centralized solution, because it only takes one lost contract (e.g., because he couldn't connect) to put a big minus in the equation. E.g., if you're going to pay a CEO tens of millions per year, and actually believe that his work is worth every cent (heh, I know, but let's keep pretending,) then... again, you better be damned sure that you don't drop _his_
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