Speaker: Brian Madden, Independent Industry Analyst and Blogger
Brian Madden: Hello, my name is Brian Madden, and welcome to this series of web videos about „Thin Client Computing‟. This video, it is actually the first part of three. This video you are watching right now is called “When to use Thin Clients?” As I said, this is a part of…it is a three-video series. So, the next video after this one is going to be about what options are available for thin clients, and the final one is how to choose which type of thin clients among all the options. But anyway, we are going to dig right now into when to use the thin clients, and it is funny because thin clients…man, this is something we have been talking about for a really long time, and this…this slide is a favorite. It is a favorite joke of Gabe. You know, like thin clients, is this a new dawn or a setting sun? Like is thin clients…is this the new wave of the future or is this something where oh, thin clients, this was, you know, that thing from the 90‟s and now, with cloud and you know, mobile tablets and everything. Thin clients are not that cool anymore. So, that is what I want to try to work out in this first video. So, I guess the first thing to say is, you know, what is the big deal when it comes to thin clients? And, you know, if you look at the philosophy of thin clients from the old days, it was all about that they…you know, they were like…like no frills, like very basic computing device, right? They had all like…only a few moving parts, you know, like no FAS, no hard drives, that kind of stuff. They had a really long lifecycle, so if you bought a thin client, it would last like seven years or whatever whereas a laptop or a desktop was, you know, two or three or four years.
The old idea with thin clients is these were something we used for task workers like people who were order entry takers or like not…you know, using only two or three screens all day long with great and harsh environments because there are no fans to suck in dust, and if they got run over by a toll motor, you could just, you know, throw away the carcass and plug in a new one. And the idea with thin clients is they didn‟t support a lot of peripherals, you know. It wasn‟t like as good as a real laptop. It was great for terminal server sessions, but the idea was most thin clients were the same. So, you had, I mean, you know, you had like Wyse and HP. Well, in the old days, you had like Wyse…oh, I don‟t even remember who were these makers, Neoware, you know, Compaq, HP. I mean, like now-a-days, it is Dell and HP basically, right, and then, a whole bunch of all other small companies. The idea was like hey, it was the same. You know, calling up, give the cheapest ones. What do you care? These are commodity throwaways anyway. So, that was the old philosophy about thin clients, but now, it is out with the old, in with the new. By the way, this…the background, this is me. At BriForum, we are talking about the old school way of thinking of stuff versus the new school way of thinking. So, that is my colleague, Benny Tritsch. She is representing the old school, and I with the new school. So, the old school thin client was, you know, the prior slide where everything is the same and these things don‟t really matter. The new is your thin client, if you look at what today‟s users want, thin client or not? You know, today‟s users, they want advanced graphics. Everyone talks about Aero like the…you know, the 3D rotating like shading and like translucency and all kind of stuff, but users who use Windows, they want advanced graphics. You know, they want to have video and all these USB devices, USB sticks, but iPhone synchronization and like cameras and all…bi-directional audio. They basically want a native experience. You know, users today, they are not thinking so much about like oh, well, this is only a thin client, so of course, I will accept a lowerquality
