Running desktops centrally and giving people a small terminal on the desk is being presented as an emerging idea. It is the fourth time this argument has been made and the previous three each ended the same way.
It was mainframes and terminals, then it was network computers in the late nineties, then it was server-based computing a few years after that. The pitch has never varied: centralise the machines, save on management, replace the expensive box on the desk with something cheap that cannot break.
The pitch keeps failing, and it fails for reasons that virtualisation does not address.
Start with the money. The hardware was never the expensive part of a desktop. A serviceable machine costs a few hundred pounds and lasts four years. What costs money is people: support, software licences, the person who walks over when something stops working. Centralising moves that cost into a data centre rather than removing it, and adds server hardware, storage, and licensing you did not previously need.
Then the failure mode, which is the part nobody demonstrates. A desktop machine that dies inconveniences one person. A central system that dies stops everybody, at once, including the people who would normally work around an outage by carrying on locally. Organisations discover their tolerance for that on the first afternoon it happens.
And the network becomes a dependency for typing. Not for saving a file or fetching mail, for the cursor appearing where you clicked. Fifty milliseconds of delay between a keystroke and a character is imperceptible on paper and maddening within an hour.
Where it genuinely works is narrow and worth naming. Call centres, where the software is one application and the staff turnover is high. Trading floors and hospitals, where the machine must be locked down. Anywhere a person needs the same session from three different rooms in a day.
I wrote last November that server consolidation was the rare enterprise purchase that pays back inside a year, and it is. That worked because servers sit still, run unattended, and mostly idle. Desktops are attached to a person with opinions about latency, and the same technology does not transfer just because the word does.