In yet another move that could be called “cloudy” in more ways than one, Dell is buying Wyse, a former terminal vendor who now specializes in “thin clients”, which I guess is what they call terminals these days. It seems to me that there’s a lot of questions about this kind of move, and that would mean more questions about Dell.
On the surface, this seems like a pretty straightforward virtual desktop play. Companies are looking to reduce their cost by replacing personal computers with thin client devices. Hey, isn’t Google pushing Chromebooks? Certainly a thin client device would present a lower cost both in terms of capex and support. And if we presume that we’re really moving to the cloud, then a thin client is a cloud client, forgetting the incremental VD cost and complexity. The problem comes when you look deeper.
Yes, there are companies who are tossing PCs for virtual desktops, particularly where PCs are being used to support clerical workers with a relatively low unit value of labor. The question is whether this sort of activity demands a specific thin client, a device that’s somehow not a PC or ultrabook or netbook or tablet or maybe even smartphone. Frankly, I don’t see how that’s going to work out.
A broadband client device needs a screen and basic navigation. It needs a keyboard (soft or hard), memory, and storage. There are differences in how a given device will trade among these features, or trade for cost, and those differences reflect primarily the expected use and type of worker. But while you can assemble displays, keyboards, memory, and processors in different ways they’re all going to end up looking something like a laptop or something like a tablet, and doesn’t Dell have both? Thus, why buy somebody to create thin clients? Especially when that whole market area is clearly going to be cost-driven with razor-thin margins.
Citrix has decided to drop OpenStack in favor of its CloudStack concept, with more compatibility with Amazon’s EC2 APIs. The move is unfortunate for the cloud but inevitable in some way. Amazon is the market leader, and they’ve resisted being dragged into standardizing cloud APIs and features for the obvious reason that it would make it easier to move stuff from their cloud to a competitor’s based on price. However, it’s bad for the market to have cloud innovation stifled by having a single provider be the standard reference for features and APIs. I like some of the work that’s being done with OpenStack, but it’s hard to see given Rackspace’s role in OpenStack how it could ever have gotten along with Amazon. And it’s harder to see how this move will advance the state of the cloud toward being a real candidate for a new distributed computing model–which it has to be in order to succeed.