Jonathan Schwartz writes, “DOIP (“Do IP”) is to the PC industry, what VOIP (voice over IP, simplistically, using the internet to make phone calls) is to the telecommunications industry. Phone calls are near to free at this point, and the business model is undergoing radical change. It’s inevitable that pervasive and sufficient bandwidth will allow most of what happens on a client to migrate to the network. Why upgrade your PC if you can rely on plentiful bandwidth to have someone centrally deliver it as a service? You don’t upgrade your TV set, BBC and News Corp do it for you every evening with fresh content. And you don’t buy a new TV to watch it. The same should apply to your PC. DOIP is to a PC as XMRadio is to a CD player. ”
He further writes about Sun Ray, an ultra-thin client which consumes 15 watts of power compared to 120+ watts for an average PC. The client does not have a HDD, nor is any state saved locally. You come to work, log in and start blogging. I think we are reaching the full circle, 15 years ago when a room full of “Terminals” were powered by large almirah like servers (they were called CPU then) placed in superly cooled chambers. Fast Forward; Today, I have to back up my laptop, download anti-spyware, upgrade to 1G RAM, apply SP4 to Win2K and pay more money to upgrade my OS to make my basic computing tasks even more difficult. Computing was simple then.