Delorean EV

[Albany Tom]

My personal experience disagrees. My previous corporate masters were very heavily into Windows virtual desktops and some sort of thin client stuff for one of our subsidiaries. Anyone could get a VDI, so I got one and used it occasionally, like when I simply could not have an ssh session disconnect at an inopportune time. It was a productivity killer of the first order. Excruciatingly slow. Maybe it was just their heavy-handed implementation, but if you're not going to be heavy-handed then you don't really need to confine people to VDIs. And to be clear, I'm on gigabit fiber at home, and would routinely see 2-300 MB per sec over the VPN, so it's not like I was on dialup.

We had half a dozen Chromebooks in use at my current company when I joined. They were perceived to be good enough for the people who used nothing but office apps and web browsing. The very first thing I was requested to do was to replace all of them with "real" laptops so people could get their work done. I've never used one so I can't speak to the user experience, but I can say that the people who were very unhappy with using them with Google Business and MS 365 are now happy with their i7 laptops (and even happier that we dumped Google).

Full desktop VDI, Citrix, or terminal server, I agree with you. It's a pretty miserable solution, that really doesn't provide any cost savings or benefit that I can see. To me it's a specific solution for a small number of problems. Like providing remote admin, or developers working outside of the US. But...published apps can work great, within their limitations. We used to run Citrix published apps for those applications that weren't modern enough to be web based, like word processing and fat client business apps. For those, it worked great. It's absolutely better than trying to run a homemade Access app over a VPN or to a small office. If you toss the manufacturer recommendations for server CPU and memory out the window, you can get performance on a remote app that you can't notice is a remote app, except for startup time being a little longer. To me, this is a stepping stone to full web everything.

A Chromebook really is my favorite way to work remotely, probably because 90% of what I do is email (o365) and meetings (webex). The device is smaller, lighter, more reliable, and has better battery capacity than a Windows device. But....if you roll out Chrome and give it to people as a low cost substitute, then yeah, it's going to fail. And yep, I agree, Google is NOT up to speed on word processing, spreadsheet, or corporate email right now. No idea how, except maybe they operate as a corporation differently than everyone else, and don't know it.

Going back to the original thread....sliding drift across weird places....I think internal combustion engines will eventually be largely replaced by electric in many or most applications. I'm hoping that this happens slower than getting rid of legacy Windows SMB and domains. Then, when someone looks at either a Delorean or a Windows computer, they'll have roughly the same reaction: A slow shake of the head, and the thought "I can't believe anyone thought these things were cool".