Why wouldn't I? Just to pile on the "My anger about manned exploration causes me to not understand what's going on today" theme? If nonsense and angry tangents is a "good moment', then what's "bad"?

Any drink with zero calories should be exempt.

My cable box is a piece of shit, and I want to put a big gaping hole through it with a .12ga slug.

Maybe but how many times has the cable company had to service it? And couldn't they just mail you a new one?

As an aside. Have you considered going cable card and getting a Tivo? I've been a customer for years and love it.

Yeah, they're fully generic, as long as they're running Windows XP, a specific version of IE6, and have precisely the correct DLLs installed to handle the stupid "thin client browser-based application" the company had written during its thin client fetish circa 2001.

That's the point why I don't consider remote clients to be thin clients.

Your Java story is the problem of supporting bad software. Bad software is bad software. I will agree though that Java doesn't deliver on the "write once run anywhere" the way it should. HTML (not Javascript) is pretty good on working anywhere, Flash ain't 1/2 bad. But if you want to see this done right look at the old textmode: curses libraries, termcap and terminfo.

Glad you agree with the distinction.

is a reduction in application management.
Exactly. Though once you get rid of highly versatile desktop apps don't forget you pick up complexity in your server apps.

and the network guy who makes sure that LAN and WAN keep talking to one another

That BTW becomes vastly more complex. Traffic is now up 1000% at least. All sorts of issues that weren't worth worrying about are now worth worrying about.

Well thought out comments. I think the big savings that people forget is real estate savings. I suspect cloud will drive IT cost up substantially and unless this is paired with mobile / home / outsourcing it will die.

"We've been down this road before."

You address a bunch of technical problems that mostly didn't stop centralization in earlier generations by analogy. There are two main factors that drive the move towards distribution is the demand for customization and performance/cost. The more centralized a service is the more complex it is. The more complex it is the higher the cost of dealing with edge case features. As those edge case features aren't dealt with rogue alternate systems start getting used. That is how Microsoft beat the mainframes.

The second is that local data and cost. You see this already on mobile devices moving towards local apps and local storage. And the reason is that objective-c is at least 100x less CPU intensive than JavaScript for the same task. Once you move to dumb, all CPU activities are happening on the server and all data is flowing through the network. The edge cases no one thinks about suddenly become the bulk of your traffic and costs.

no more long-term planning of purchases of those servers

That depends if the company is moving to 100% off the shelf cloud solutions or not. If not, they are making long-term planning in funding development and signing long term service contracts.

the point is, that you don't have to move *everything* to the cloud in order to make savings and find other benefits.

Then you are just talking about what stuff goes on which server and of course there are benefits of AWS for some apps. To have what Gartner is talking about everything needs to be off the PC. Local machines to be disposable must be generic.

The CRM solution is already on a server running remotely from the desktop. Moving to dumb terminals doesn't eliminate server teams it increases them.

I would be surprised if 10% of all IT jobs are now done offshore

What! Think about all the application development jobs. Think about all the inhouse software development jobs using remote teams. Think about all those call center support jobs. Hardware manufacturing jobs. I'd be shocked if more than 25% of the total possible jobs are domestic.

Dumb terminals have been around for decades and didn't end the desktop.

First off in anything it was mostly the other way around. The rich desktops killed the dumb terminals. But... if you think about what happened right after, we moved towards the world of locked down desktops. The rich configurable desktops were killed by a push back in the dumb terminal direction.

Thanks for the tip!