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Re: [LUG] MSO, OOo and the executable metaphor

 

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

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