6 ms·
They can see the writing on the wall. For both consumers and business users, a PC with a full OS is a liability compared to a lightweight client machine and clo
by ams6110 9y ago
They can see the writing on the wall. For both consumers and business users, a PC with a full OS is a liability compared to a lightweight client machine and cloud services (either hosted in Azure or on-premises).
The wheel has circled back around to the early 1990s. Remember client-server? Only now, it's practical. The universal client (web browser) is all most users need. The nightmare of managing local installations of the client software is gone. Management of user PCs, drivers, updates, dealing with malware, is all going to be a thing of the past.
- balls187 9y ago> The wheel has circled back around to the early 1990s Try late 60's with time-sharing.
- ams6110 9y agoTrue, but that's more like the web of 10 years ago when the client side was dumb and everything was processed and rendered on the server.
- drudru11 9y agoRight - the Ken Olsen quote.
- mikestew 9y agoThe difference being that if you, the vendor, make a piggish mess of JavaScript soup, you only hurt yourself because it runs on your machine. Today, Google doesn’t care the GMail tab is hogging all the resources of the machine on which it executes because they’re my resources, not Google’s.
- pjmlp 9y agoYeah, I remember the JavaOS for the NC (Network Computer) and the terminals sold by Sun and Oracle. What I hate on the so called universal client is that we could have had a proper solution with XHTML and all the XML semantic derivatives, instead we get a document model pretending to be an UI framework. WebComponents seem to still be WIP.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoWorse is better seems to apply here . To be honest it seems like modern frameworks Comp like down to HTML. In a decade maybe WHATWG will standardize components that are compatible with all the frameworks (React , Angular , Vue ). Also the velocity of these JavaScript frameworks encourages worse is better to the extreme.
- Indolat 9y ago> lightweight client machine.... The universal client (web browser) is all most users need. That was quite funny. Of all heavy-weight professional applications I currently use, the modern web browser is the very worst resource hog (even when running rather simple web-apps). Even VS2017 can't beat it.
- j45 9y agoThe browser is finally starting to deliver as the universal interface, and with it, the resource hogging. Seems odd when laptops are maxed out on RAM for running the browser.
- candiodari 9y agoBut when people start mentioning in alienware gaming laptop reviews (the laptops with GTX1080, the non-mobile version, and 64G of RAM) that it still doesn't run 80 tabs smoothly ... it might be time to rethink some of the software architecture of browsers.
- j45 9y agoHa, I have to admit I saw one of those GTX1080 laptops and it made me wonder if it would help enough with handling an unreasonable number of browser tabs.
- Indolat 9y agoBrowsers consume some 10x-20x resources comparing to a native application that performs exactly the same task.