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Simon Waters wrote: > However in a business environment, I could see tools like Zimbra wiping > out local mail clients and work flow tools. The ability to login, and > have your whole email/document/contact/diary stuff all integrated, and > available from any desktop is too big a draw, chuck in a few Zimlets and > you can have 90%+ of what most businesses use IT for in a browser from > anywhere. Better yet you can deploy it immediately by buying a hosted > service, and the upgrades will be effectively automatic. If it's really that good, why did people start moving away from mainframes? Centralised server-based computing vs. distributed computing go in and out of fashion on a regular basis, probably a couple of times each in the last twenty years. At one point people were using mainframes and minis with dumb terminals, then desktop technology started evolving and people started using their desktop machines for more and more work, until the likes of Sun and Oracle went mad on the whole "thin client" thing six or seven years ago, but advancing desktop technology again swung the pendulum the other way. I'd guess it happens firstly because neither model is ideally suited to the way that everyone wants to work and secondly because whilst companies like Sun, HP, IBM and Oracle made a lot of money out of selling huge monolithic systems, companies like Intel make their money by selling enormous numbers of CPUs, which largely means lots of desktop boxes. Perhaps there's also an element of "management" wanting centralised control and maximised return on budget vs. individuals wanting to be able to do their own thing and have CPU cycles on tap. Now, if you could create a system that really was centralised, but could give individuals or separate groups absolute control over their part of the system so it actually looked like a desktop box, then you might have something. An alternative might be lots of individual systems loading organisation-wide applications such as mail clients and "office" applications from a centrally-maintained repository, but allowing local installation of other applications and distributing the processing amongst any machines on the network that happened to have free cycles at the time. The disadvantage of this is that you still have lots of complex hardware to maintain. (The former has it's problems too, if you think about single points of failure.) Even for home use, it would be quite cool from a management point of view to have a central system that acts as a PVR, manages the home security system, handles the phone system, provides a centralised audio player as well as lots of other things I've not thought of. I'll be queuing for a ski pass for Hell before I'd consider putting all that data on some random corporation's servers just because they could provide me with some centralised application set though. James -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html