End of the line for the fat PC?

"An unmanageable, bug-ridden, cost centre whose real lifetime cost is routinely calculated to be around 10 times its purchase price, and in some cases significantly more."

That is how Information Age describes the desktop PC in an article, Virtualising the desktop, by Phil Jones that describes how some organisations are questioning their PC replacement programmes.

Phil describes how Bracknell Forest Borough Council has realised that nobody uses all of the capabilities of a desktop PC, and "that management of that device is getting more complex and that’s not to mention the power that they use and the CO2 they produce as well." Instead, the council is looking at how it can change things by using thin-client technology and desktop virtualisation.

The latter strategy, it seems, is already being considered by many other organisations in the US and UK too. Indeed, Gartner is forecasting virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) suppliers will enjoy a booming global market worth $2 billion by 2011, and, Phil says, "all of the world’s 450 million business PCs are now firmly in their marketing sights".

Most of the article focuses on the (often substantial) efficiency and cost savings - up to 40% in some cases - achieved by adopting virtual desktops; for example:

Once a PC is converted into a virtual machine it loses all the constraints and vulnerabilities that go with dependence on a single piece of hardware, and instead gains all the advantages that go with being deployed against a set of secure, scalable and closely managed data centre resources. ... the failure of one has no consequences for any others, and each virtual machine can still be configured to whatever personal specification the end-user requires.

However, there was no further talk about the potential energy savings that might come from adopting thin-client technology. As we noted in a post-script to our Greening Government ICT post last month, a thin-client computer uses a tenth of the power of a conventional PC, so it's no wonder that thin-client technology features among the 18 measures suggested to create a greener government ICT regime. Such savings can clearly also be achieved in local government and corporate ICT regimes too.

The ridiculous device

In an accompanying editorial, PCs will evaporate into 'the cloud', Information Age editor Kenny McIver recalls Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his 1995 vision of the network computer, quoting him: "A PC is a ridiculous device … The idea is so complicated and expensive. What the world really wants is to plug into a wall to … get data." As McIver says, thousands of PCs can be replaced with the equivalent functionality, delivered as a service from 'the cloud', with half a dozen ways of taking services into the cloud – blade PCs, server-based virtualised desktops, software-as-a-service, applications virtualisation and hosted applications, among others. The end-goal is the same – to get rid of the "ridiculous device".