A substantial majority of workers charged with using a PC in the course of a workday use only a fraction of the available application features or computing power. Armed and dangerous, underinformed users sitting at overpowered desktops are a constant drain on the limited resources of IT time, budget, and talent. But high-tech innovation leapfrogged itself time and again to dramatically increase computing power with accompanying and precipitous drops in price. The industry responded to the plummeting cost of computing power with applications that required increased power at the desktop. The cycle continued, leaving in its wake a staggering legacy of expense and waste on corporate desktops worldwide.
All sources agree that the costs are headed through the roof - with no sign of relief in sight.
It is sometimes confusing that there are as many variations on the implementation of thin-client computing as there are names by which it goes. Only client keystrokes and mouse movements are transmitted from the client over the network to the server. There is no one hard and fast definition of how thin a device must be to be considered a thin client. NCs have an OS installed and can execute small Java-based applets locally using the hard disk as a local cache. To this day, there are millions of dumb terminals that skipped the client-server revolution, and another set of PCs numbering in the millions that function primarily as mainframe terminal emulators.