Looking forward to thin-client? Not a chance.

This little essay is in response to the article here. It's required reading for this class, but I'm interested to see what other people's thoughts are about this.

Personally, I think this woman is crazy. Not because she is wrong, but because she is looking forward to it. There are very limited benefits to the end user, while the industry makes out like a bandit. Honestly, how often do you need remote access to your computer system? I rely on my computer much more than the average person, and even I don't need to access remotely often enough to set up a VPN. Which, by the way, is what companies already do if people need to dial in remotely. So why exactly does the average user need to be able to access his computer from any terminal in the world?

From the industry standpoint, on the other hand, the advantages never end. The name of the game in the software industry is control. The more control the company has over your use of the program, the more money they can extract out of you. Under the current system, you get a copy of the program on a cd, but you have to type a license number when install it, but then when you run the program you have authenticate it over the internet. You get incremental updates for free, but you have to pay again for any version updates. Under the new thin-client model, you don't even get a copy of the cd. What if you change your configuration and need to reinstall the program? You rely completely on the company to even verify that you bought the program in the first place.

Changing to a thin-client terminal also adds another layer of support that someone else has to provide. The way things are now, you are basically responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of your system. Under the new model, since the majority of the computing is done offsite somewhere else, you have to pay someone to maintain the system. Granted right now those of us that know computers end up helping the people that don't, but that's still better than paying someone else to do it.

Ms. Wood was right about bandwidth, that will definitely be a problem. She clearly doesn't know very much about server architecture, however, because she missed a problem that will make the bandwidth issues look like small potatoes. The infrastructure for a system that remotely provides all your computing applications would have to be unbelievably complex.

As an example, there exists a massive online role playing game called World of Warcraft. It is by far the most popular online game ever, with over 200,000 users. You can think of it as the game portion of an online operating system. There is no offline component, you must play it connected to the network. 200,000 users represents less than 1% of people that use computers on a daily basis, and obviously 1 game isn't as complex as an entire operating system running a host of programs. Even though, the servers crash on a regular basis, due to everything from database corruption (think online data storage) to general performance issues from slow hardware. This system represents the most sophisticated online network ever created, with hundreds of servers and millions in hardware, and it can barely keep up. The "Big 20" (the twenty oldest and most populated servers) have an uptime around 70%. How'd you like your computer to work only 70% of the time? And before you joke about how much your computer crashes already, keep in mind that represents an average uptime of 98%.

The last issue, which again Ms. Wood glazes over but misses for the most part, is cost. Blizzard charges $15 a month to access World of Warcraft, but they still can't afford to upgrade the hardware to the point they would like to. I should point out that $15 is after you shell out $50 for the initial purchase. Assume technology makes some advances and companies can afford to charge only $5 a month. You still have to pay a large monthly bill, even by conservative estimates. That's $5 each for the OS, a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, and a photo editing program. I'm assuming that web browsers and email applications will remain free, for the most part, but tack on another $5 if you use Outlook. At best, you're paying an additional $20 a month to access programs you've already had to pay for (remember the $50 for Warcraft?) and we haven't even talked about paying for online data storage yet.

Providing online email is one thing, but it's nowhere close to a thin-client OS. And I for one am happy about that, because when it does get here we'll all be paying more and getting less. And if you think I'm nuts, just click on the "Talkback" link in the article.

But I'm curious, what do "average users" think about thin-client computing?