Thin is in
Published: 01 Jun 2005 14:10 BST
You can never be too rich or too thin — except on the desktop. Here, the traditional model is for flabby operating systems at artificially inflated prices, keeping IT departments poor and their deployments as nimble and streamlined as Robbie Coltrane in a pair of Speedos.
The answer, as anyone selling thin client systems will tell you, is thin client systems. On paper, this idea has always solved the major problems of corporate desktops: centrally managed and with user tampering severely limited, thin clients can be made more secure and more reliable than networked PCs and at much less cost. Capital expenditure can be kept down — and environmental consciences placated — by the use of older computers as the clients, leaving the serious grunt in the server rooms where it can be more effectively controlled.
Reality hasn't always matched up to this. Costs have been set to be 'competitive' with fat clients, sometimes by companies who stand to lose a lot if thin takes over, sometimes by those happy to keep margins up in vertical markets. A lack of flexibility and no lack of performance issues has stymied many a deployment in the past.
Now, though, the major factor is inertia. Thin clients need a different way of planning, a different purchasing cycle and changes to some extent in the way everyone works. It's easier to keep the old ways.
The time has come to think again. The dichotomy between thick and thin is no longer as clear as it was — see the DTI's investment in a centrally managed secure Linux desktop system combining elements of both — and virtualisation, blade servers and gigabit networking are all changing the IT environment in ways that benefit a thin approach.
Even if you don't believe all the claims for ROI and operational wonderfulness, the upsides are worth investigating — and if the promises of scalability and manageability are halfway true, 50 seats running basic office tasks as an assessment exercise will repay your consideration. At the very least, run the numbers: the signs are that thin will become as painfully fashionable on the desktop as in the pages of Vogue.
In the longer term, there is a danger that we will paint ourselves into an evolutionary corner. When corporate desktop PCs no longer need to keep up with home machines just because the same operating system runs on both, we'll be back in the era of smart terminals that don't change for years. That means resources are freed up to concentrate on more advanced servers with better management and stronger security — at which point, the death of the desktop seems a small price to pay.
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