The battle between thick- and thin-client started in the mid-80s. At one corner was the Unix camp who led the technological innovation and was pushing a new thing called X Windows: a desktop standard for all Unix workstations. Over the other corner were Apple and Microsoft doing PCs with (then) rudimentary desktops. The Unix people came up with a great idea: a very cheap display-only device with practically no computational power connected to a big hunky server in the machine room. They call that X Terminal. That industry, short lived, made many millionaires in silicon valley. And everyone thought the battle was over. Thick clients won. X Terminal disappeared.
Several years ago, Sun Microsystems introduced SunRay display client, the same X Terminal with some new twists. It accepts a smart-card as the authentication device, and has global session migration. Insert your badge into any SunRay and, viola, whatever you were working on — email, presentation, documents, whatever — magically show up on the screen. Remove your badge and the screen just goes blank. Your badge became your computer. We were imagining every hotel rooms or coffee shops to have such device. Of course you knew what happened to Sun Micro. The SunRay project was not dead, but is probably in zombie zone in the deep of Oracle. That was yet another death for the thin-client.
I watched the news of Chrome Book with great interest. Isn’t this yet another resurrection of the dead thin-client?
Is it a fatal flaw for a computer to require a tether to the cloud? When all connections are off, my Kindle, iPad, laptop, etc. are still quite usable. I can read, write, or be entertained with them in offline mode. Except for my email messages, all my files fit into a $30 thumb drive that practically every computer would accept (not iPad, alas).
Finally, Chromebooks cost around $350 or more. You can easily buy a netbook with that. Laptops these days are really not expensive. Why would anyone pay more (or not less) for less?