My computer, fat or thin

The divide between thin and fat clients is narrowing, as network design and structure is centralised.

There is one important element missing from the launch of Windows XP, without which no Microsoft operating system inauguration would be complete. As our systems stagger under another, even more baroque software release, where are the techno-puritans who traditionally stand up and tell us all this software is just too much? Where is the thin-client brigade?

Six years ago, hot on the heels of Windows 95, people saw how much local area network (Lan) bandwidth was available and they saw the potential of internet protocols. Larry Ellison suggested we could run applications using minimal hardware - the network computer or NC. Since then, thin-client protests have greeted every new release from Microsoft, citing credible return on investment figures to prove just how bad fat clients really are.

The struggle concerns which type of information resource - network or computer - is more central to users' needs. And it goes back a long way: in the 1980s, Sun - "the network is the computer" - tried to sell diskless workstations, which could do nothing without a network connection.

For a couple of weeks after XP, the thin-client people were conspicuously quiet. With good reason, considering their obvious lack of progress - even the most positive estimates calculate that thin clients represent only one per cent of business desktops.

But then Wyse, almost the only significant hardware manufacturer still preaching the thin-client gospel, stuck its head over the parapet. "Put your server in the datacentre, not on the desktop," said Stephen Yeo, Wyse's marketing director for Europe, referring to the fact that XP will only run on a computer with the kind of specification that pretty muscular NT servers usually have.

But if we look under the hood, the next round of Wyse products have a whopping 128MB of RAM and 96MB of Flash memory. And they are running XP, or at least an embedded version. So if these new thin clients are running a version of the biggest desktop operating system of them all, what are Wyse and other thin-client vendors trying to sell?

The truth is that the cost of the client was never part of the argument. The new plumped-up thin clients are meant to be better managed, because everything that matters is centralised.

It ought to make sense to design networks from the ground up, but most of us still hesitate to rely too heavily on systems that might go wrong.

Every time round the block, the thin-client promoters make a better and better case, while making their clients a little more like PCs. And at the same time, Microsoft makes its desktops a little more manageable and a little better behaved as network citizens.

The result will be that the two concepts merge. Microsoft desktops will be completely controllable from servers, and NCs will be tough enough to stand on their own two feet when the network fails. At this point, both sides will claim victory, as every desktop will fit the definition of both NC and PC. If we're lucky, the things we want to do on our networks will work reliably.