dilettante

What next?

Windows Home Server Preview

dannyb

Windows Pro Server
Windows Home Advanced
Windows Server Easy Edition
A remake of Windows ME

What will the world come to?

PrOpHeT

Personally I envision it all going to lightweight terminals and you pay a subscription for your os/applications.

The technology is there, the OS as we know it is doomed.

DougT

The idea of Thin Clients has been around for tens of years but never really 'took off'. I'm not sure that the wheel will turn that much, or will we all end up with 'dumb' terminals connected to a SuperServer somewhere ?
I seem to recall that that sort of architecture used to be quite popular. Whilst it had its own problems, management and control wasn't one of them

dilettante

I had thought that things were headed this way myself, especially with all of the talk about moving to a "subscription model" to ensure steady revenue flow for both OS and application products (Office, etc.).

The Web 2.0 crazies sure seem to want to take things that way. Anything to make a buck off other peoples' misery I guess.

But by introducing these sorts of products I wonder if Microsoft may not be backing away from the idea. It certainly seems to be aimed at data backup more than anything else, even though at first I thought it was a Home File Server solution. Perhaps it is "two mints in one" and can be used both ways?

Or given the long product lead times at Microsoft (and seeing that it's based on Win2003 instead of Vista Server) perhaps it is a dead end rather than a trend coming from Redmond. Maybe the thing has its own momentum within Microsoft and might see release even though they've actually bought into a subscription-based future at this point? The real push may have come from home hardware vendors looking to sell you another box. HP seems prominent in almost everything I've seen about this OS product.

dilettante

Links:

WHS Home Page

Robocopy built into Vista and other items related to WHS. A blog.

PrOpHeT

So what we have "Advanced" to is yet another attempt to offer people with no knowledge of what a computer is much less what it does an over bloated "We know what is best for you" out of the box monstrosity with everything you ever wanted and much more you didn't.

That’s why I liked dos, in the dos days the only people that used computers were people that either knew what they were doing or paid someone that did. And when you installed dos, you got just that DOS. If you needed something else you added it.

MS needs to release a core OS, go ahead and put all the bells and whistles on the disk, give the numbskulls a fancy little wizard that tells them what they want while playing a catchy little tune so they can have their techno savvy ego trip, give the more cerebral a concise manual of each components function and dependency on other components.

I liken it to the analogy that if other technologies paralleled each other as the OS/Hardware world did we would have scenarios like jet fuel manufacturers saying “It is ok to mix our product with mud because the engines are getting more powerful. We will even throw in something to make the exhaust a pretty shade of purple so the pilots are so distracted they won’t notice!”


BTW, DougT: You may be surprised at how much the thin world has reemerged, check out www.wyse.com which is of course one of many. I have converted many businesses to thin environments and if done correctly it can save many thousands in everything from hardware to administrative costs. The AS400 world is still very much alive and well as well. There is real market potential in the ASP (Application Service Provider) department. I have seen many medical applications and some law firms as well; totally convert to ASP’s and not even house a local server and or install local applications. Setting up a new client was a preconfigured $150 solid state device that all you had to do was plug in the peripherals and turn it on, keep a spare one or two on the shelf and swap them on failure. No viruses, addware, updates, patches, backups... Everything is handled by the ASP for a monthly fee, granted it is not without its downfalls as well, but for a large slice of the modern business world it is ideal.

dilettante

I still think the push for this came from hardware manufacturers looking for another market in the home.

Part of the pressure for this may have come from the consumer/SOHO NAS enclosures on the market. The value-add here is perhaps RAID in the box and automatic backups initiated by the file server (pulling from clients).

There is some talk about integrating this with Media Center as well, to form a sort of "spider" in the center of a home network.


Both thin-client deployment and "ASP" (the current buzz seems to be "Software as a Service" or SAAS) have their strong points. We've moved away from Citrix/Terminal Services of late though, everyone seems to think ASP.Net is the answer for thin (web) clients. I'm not entirely sold. Ajax web apps mostly suck even on a desktop client let alone something like a typical thin client box running a browser.

Maybe I need to see some thin boxes that can run a slightly richer custom client? Probably based on ActiveX or .Net one-click to allow HTTP deployment.


But WHS doesn't even try to touch any of that market. It's meant as a file sharing and backup appliance.


I believe Longhorn Server is supposed to be produced in a "core" version with no GUI head, or just a very minimalist shell.

Ahh: Longhorn Server Preview 2 Server Core: Windows Without Windows