2by4 - 2:28 am on Mar 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

"So Google is, in fact, creating a network-based OS, if you will...not the standard tired desktop OS..."

Yeah, that's technically a way you can look at it, but I think it's easy to get carried away with this. What Ebay or Amazon or Yahoo provide you with are certain web based applications, and I definitely see the web moving more and more towards providing more web based applications, such as google search, yahoo/hotmail/gmail, but that's not something I'd call a thin client per se, a thin client has nothing in it to speak of.

The day I see a consumer migration to this type of Ellison vision is going to happen sometime around the time consumers in the USA stop moving their bodies around in 1-2 ton objects made out of steel and plastic and start using only public transportation.

Obviously Google, Yahoo, or any other company that is trying to make itself into a portal of some type, will try to offer as many services as it can to lock in its users, but that's a far cry from thin client computing.

If you've ever taken a close look at privacy laws regarding your emails stored elsewhere than your machine, you might find yourself slightly disturbed. Or not. The same laws would apply to any data you stored there. Those are the now virtually non-existent laws protecting your online behavior from unwarranted scrutiny, that most, but not all, ISP's hand over to almost any agency that requests them, without even the benefit of a court order or suboena.

Consumers are buying faster and faster pcs with bigger and bigger hard drives, the amounts of data they store isn't practical to support in terms of transfer speeds in a WAN type setting, what Ellison is really talking about is controlled corporate environments, where data is stored on central file servers, then moves over extremely high speed connections to the thin clients on that network. That vision is becoming very close to realizable now, and I think more and more smart corporations are going to start moving to some version of that, or to slim clients. But those are internally controlled networks, not public, very slow connections relatively speaking. For $60 a month you can get around 4 mb a second, on a decent new lan you get 1 gigabit, some 10 gigabit. Those lans transfer data as fast as an internal harddrive request roughly. That's really what Ellison is referring to, that's what Sun sells, or wants to sell, that has nothing to do with WAN thin client computing.

Very few consumers are going to give up the speed they are paying for to give all their data to some third party, MS tried this very thing and it was totally rejected by the market, correctly so.