A Nice Summer?
July 29, 2010
Hey, how was your Summer break? I wish I could say I've been having nothing but fun, but I can't lie to you that way. Lots of work, lots of family stuff (need a hammer? I have lots...) and more of a break than I had planned. It's good to be back and looking forward to Interop New York.
I've been struck by the absolute frenzy in sub-laptop platforms since we were all together in Las Vegas. I'm not talking about netbooks (though they keep cropping up as well) but iPads, iPhones and Android phones, and even Windows Mobile phones, though I think there are a lot of folks who would rather not talk about those right now. The most interesting thing to me (at least right now) is that these little devices are, in many ways, the flowering of the thin-client revolution we were hearing about back in the mid-90s. Sure, they have some storage on board and all that, but to get enterprise applications to truly function well they're acting as thin clients. Citrix is all over this, and other vendors are joining in the fun; the real question is what all of this portability is going to do to business network management and security. I mean, forget the basics of VPNs and encrypted disks, the very real possibility of just forgetting the darned thing after reading a book at a bar is rather higher than with a laptop computer.
It's not that there's nothing else going on in the industry -- there is a lot, and I'm going to be talking about much of it her over the next few weeks -- but the ultra-portable stuff is sexy, game-changing, and here. I'm really looking forward to New York...
Curt Franklin
Online Community Manager
Interop