According to a recent article in Forbes this month, the days of the PC are numbered. Thinking about this, a tough question comes to my mind about why people so often like to “kill” whatever has come to be the core of our daily operations to improve business productivity and operations efficiency.
One of the reasons could be that killing something brings the opportunity to quickly reinvent its replacement. This gives some a chance to make several hundreds of thousands Euros or more spent on services and, sometimes, on more expensive platforms to re-think, re-architect and re-deploy the so transformed infrastructure.
But, as and IT decision maker, would you sacrifice biz productivity, as a result of IT transformation for the sake of it? I don’t think you would, but sometimes some misunderstandings or misinterpretation of technology relationships and implications take all of us to forget for moments what real business needs are and how these and IT challenges can be both addressed without sacrificing business performance and productivity.
The article from Forbes called “The Death of the PC” deems “Virtualization” as the best “big thing” in computing and envisions Desktop Virtualization as Act II to change and affect everyone in the industry of PC’s. The same article recognizes the limitations of virtualization: costs of virtual PC are 50% higher and there are also performance issues for rich media application, a gap which major software vendors are working on.
Those limitations are also pointed out by Gartner, who says that most of the hype surrounding cost-benefit related to thin client is bogus and that the current and projected adoption rates for thin client remain a small proportion of Biz PC state for years to come
The article is assuming that vendors will close the performance and costs gaps to remove today’s barrier to prevent virtualization adoption - and therefore - thin client to kill the PC. I would really doubt about this, not only because technology cost will decrease both in PC and server side (and CTO’s will dislike the idea of running “power point” workloads with limited business value on more expensive datacenter resources), but also because the inherent performance advantage of running new rich media applications and collaborative environments locally, will keep as long as PC technologies keep on evolving and those new applications become more demanding.
Even so, we agree that Desktop Virtualization will happen anyway and will bring great advantages for IT Management in terms of flexibility and control. We will see a significant growth in virtualization licenses throughout 2012 although probably less that the 60 mill licenses that IDC is predicting.
What Forbes article is missing is that Desktop Virtualization does not mean “server computing” and, moreover, server computing wouldn’t necessarily mean a Thin Client device in all scenarios. IDC predicts that more than 65% of desktop virtualization licenses deployed throughout 2012 will be client-side virtualization (application streaming, virtual containers, and others). This means that “virtualized” applications or “virtual PC” execution will take place in the physical PC, providing end users with rich PC experience and capabilities that end users demand while giving IT the centralization and control factors that IT demands to address complexity and increase flexibility and agility for applications delivery.
The reason for such phenomenon is that organizations will want to take advantage of technologies, but they will not sacrifice the productivity advantages that PC beings, simply because it is not necessary at all to sacrifice them (and, as client – side, Dynamic Virtual Clients Solutions mature this will become even more true).
Most CIO’s simply will not run the risk of coming back to a dumb “evolved green screen” terminal (to make it the “productivity” tool in hands of users and the first interface of these with biz application”), just for a 2 years enlargement of refresh cycle. That decision would definitely impact on user’s productivity, it wouldn’t provide mobility and it could tie down organization to technology obsolescence that prevents future evolution to new applications, interfaces and technology use models