I have been thinking a lot about the next bounce of the ball in technology i.e where the next big shift in the industry will take place.  It got me thinking of a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few years ago. Is it best to have all of your applications installed on a local computer (fat client) or would it be better to have applications installed on a remote computer (thin client) that you could login to and access from any terminal connected to the Internet? At the time we had this discussion the bandwidth available was not large enough but over the last five years things have started to change.

The move to thin clients via web apps

This has been an interesting question for me recently as like most people I multiple computers (work computer, home computer, iPhone, mac mini running multimedia etc) and you do not want to manage all of these machine separately. There have been some advances in syncing files from multiple computers using the cloud. Applications such as DropBox come to mind but what about applications?

I am using web applications more and more to replace my desktop applications, Google have been a leader in this, I use Google reader now instead of a desktop equivalent RSS reader, people use Google mail instead of Outlook. But this is still fragmented into different browsers, there is no concept of a desktop or preferences for a set of web apps.

Applications in the cloud

What would be ideal is all of your data and applications in the cloud. You access your desktop by logging into a remote computer over the Internet and access your computer from anywhere.
This would allow you to install applications with one click, run upgrades easily and have all of your hardware managed centrally. This means that redundancy could be built into your access so that if your hard drive fails another node could run as a slave until the master drive is restored. It would also mean that backups would be easily performs all on a pay-per-use model.

Thin clients and software licensing

Thin clients could change the way that software licensing works; from a one off fee to purchase software into a monthly subscription. This would mean that you would receive any new software updates and would have a dramatic effect on software piracy which can only be a good thing.

Thin clients are not going to be around tomorrow but I think that as people become more comfortable with web applications and the Internet bandwidth is increased perhaps we will see a shift to thin clients.