Just today I heard about the Microsoft plan for a virtualized, thin client cloud PC.

What does it all mean?

Thin clients are laptops that have very minimal software inside them, natively. The idea springs from 1970s, when a bunch of hippies started attacking mainframes, because of fears that computing would mean the end of work. The mainframes (servers) were pretty expensive, so technicians devised a way to access the computers from afar. The way was called thin clients; idea being that mainframes would be safe, locked up. Sounds familiar in 2021? Yes, data centers.

So thin clients are not a new thing in the history of computing, but 2021 is a year where thin clients have got much better hardware. Networks are also getting faster and with low latency, which makes the user experience possibly smoother and enjoyable.

One of the things that has bothered traditional laptop users for ages has been a few things:

• software updates being slow and tedious to do
• having both local and on-cloud documents makes sometimes work confusing, in a corporate or other organizational environment

Tech is sometimes bloated with acronyms. There’s so much apparently new things going on, that marketing has hard time distinguishing what companies actually mean by a combination of two or three words.

Microsoft’s Cloud PC and Windows365 will certainly be interesting move in the paradigms of computing. More to come in August 2021!