DWP CTO predicts the end of Windows

yester me - yester you- yester browse

Arrive through the browser... Hmmm IE 6 anyone? This is coming from the same Dept that is guilty of running a hopelessly out of date browser well past any time that could be considered prudent.

I have huge reservations about my data being faffed around in a cloud - I expect it to be on a closed system away from identity thieves etc - thats not a new problem.. a former partner had a false claim made during 1983 at an office some 150 miles away.

Wireless networking to support outreach workers? Yeah sure... about the same time as our Market One exchange gets FTTH maybe...

So my question is... what has this guy been smoking?

Coat - it has the Governments hand in looking for more cash for yet another Taxpayer funded IT disaster that will assure them a handsome kickback/seat on the board

How Ironic..

When browsing to this article about the prediction that Windows will become no more, I got a full screen advert for Microsoft...

Wow, another genius discovers the cloud

So he discovered google docs on his iPad and thinks he's solved all the puzzle's of IT strategy.

This post is such a typical opinion for people who make very senior level IT decisions that they have forgotten the fundamental reality, that IT is plumbing and plumbing depends on the technical details they have forgotten - systems, software architectures, services buitl into the software stack, availability of infrastructure...

OK, so: (1) it's been true for almost a decade that few workloads require that much of a desktop experience. The trouble is that the little they do require still IS a full desktop experience. That's why all thin client models are at best marginal. Will it change in 10 years? Maybe. But I still think for real work, locally installed software with local processing hardware will still be he reliable sensible choice.

(2) The ubiquitous WiFi stuff is nice, except it will never be 100% ubiquitous. While travelling, I find thousands of places where neither WiFi nor 3G reach. In 10 years these places will be fewer, but they will still exist, which means anyone depending solely on the cloud will SOL.

(3) We're finding ways to make wireless networks more secure all the time, but so do criminals find ways of hacking them. Let's not count them out, until they are out.

(4) Doing work is about more than having relevant information on hand. I can see a massive role for tablets, as information access devices, replacing mountains of paper (assuming that info can be digitized). I can't see tablets (I mean non-computing tablets) being much use to someone who needs to process the information. Quite a lot of people do that you know.

(5) As for MS and the value of the OS, let anyone who thinks it doesn't matter, try to do real work on a cloud based device without all the heavy OS integrated services. Try working on an iPad only to discover things like built-in network and file sharing protocol support matters, messaging stacks matter, file systems matter. And without them you are left with a fragmented nightmare of workarounds (what apple calls "apps"). Then suddenly Microsoft is your hero;-)

Fail because the guy forgot the fundamentals of what pays his salary.

Means well...

"delivered via the network to clever thin client terminals"

When you use the word clever, in this context in a tech related discussion of this nature, your cachet plummets in my estimation!

My favourite was from two old ladies on a bus back in 2002, 'All these clever computers these days, you'd think they'd do something about the weather.'.

Ah, bless their little blue rinses!

Maybe in his world, but not in everyone else's

The govt subtentacle where I work is currently forcing its payroll staff back onto IE6 in order to be able to roll out a "new" payroll system.

Draw your own conclusions.

Don't Work Properly!

You made it look like that was not intentional......

It WAS intentional, wasn't it?

A who said what now ?

I had to go back and read that again, because at first I read it wrong and it looked like you were expecting me to take someone from DWP in the least seriously when talking about IT. Oh, wait ...

Mmm k.

Reading this, it's obvious the problem with government IT procurement isn't the technology - it's the people.

Someone with clue could probably make almost any technology work. Thin/fat server/client cloudy/desktopy - whatevs.

But if there's a nano-brainiac with the deep insight of a bath sponge in charge and the frontliners are failed Dalek wannabes on incapacity benefit - fuggedaboutit.

Thin clients might be relevant when...

...their TCO is a fraction of a palette of cheap Windows boxes. At present, they're a great many times more. Things look great until you realise you need either a wad of VMs or terminal servers to power them, the network infrastructure to make them usable, and the software licenses to run them on.

Not running LInux then

""It takes that long for a desktop operating environment to get so long in the tooth that no matter what you do you can't keep it going any longer. And we'll keep it that long because the costs of getting a working desktop in the first place are so absurdly high that doing anything else is completely irresponsible,"

What he means, is it takes that long for Microsoft to launch the replacement, to issue the final service pack, to issue a number of security patches some of which appear designed to degrade your systems' performance, to cease all support, and finally for someone to "discover" a still-unfixed and now unfixable day-zero bug.

If it were open source you could keep it running for as long as you wanted to.

If the files it processed were all fully open standards then there really wouldn't be an issue about whether you used a decades-old desktop or the very latest one. It's only Microsoft that hardwires the file format to the processing program to the desktop O/S, for their own commercial gain and everyone else's pain.

(Not sure if it's relevant, but I recently booted Win 98 SE in a VM under Linux. Took all of two seconds to boot and was a vastly more responsive environment than Win 7 native on the same hardware.)