morbiuswilters:Thin clients usually consume far less power, take up less space and have very minimal OSes that don't require continuous maintenance. Obviously they aren't perfect for every scenario, but there's more to cost of ownership than just the initial price tag. Also, many times thin client deployments number in the thousands so the buyer gets discounts for buying in bulk.
Ah, standard marketing blurb.
Let me relate my personal favorite Thin Client story:
Among my other pursuits, I'm logistics manager at a non-profit that does electronics recycling. One of my favorite customers is an IT manager for a large banking chain.
The first time I met him, he was backing into my loading dock with a truck full of CRT monitors. Hundreds of them, stacked with a density that we still cannot match to this day.
"Finally gettin' LCDs! The CEO got one at home and said we had to!" he exclaimed when I asked the obvious question: "WTF!?"
The next time I met him, a year later, he was backing into my loading dock with a truck full of older desktop PCs that obviously matched the previous load of CRTs.
"CEO didn't like that his desktop PC didn't color match his new LCD! New workstations for everybody!"
The next time I met him, a scant 6 months later, he was backing into my loading dock with a truck full of brand new desktop PCs, older servers, and all manner of fancy Cisco 10/100 and Gigabit gear.
"The CEO read a pamphlet about the lower total cost of ownership of thin clients. We're rolling them out branch-by-branch now. The server and network upgrades are killing us. All these shiny new desktops are going to be coming your way now."
The next time I met him, 6 months later, he was backing into my loading dock with a truck full of brand new desktop PCs, and blocking my parking lot with 3 more trucks full of, respectively, servers, networking gear, and an entire truck stuffed end-to-end with CAT5.
"This is getting out of hand. I know I didn't mention it, but what do you think we should do with all this CAT5? Our entire datacenter is 10gig fiber now"
Our discussion was cut short as I personally oversaw the transfer of the Great Copper Motherlode to the secure area of our facility (and 15 minutes after they left, onto a truck bound for cashout)
The next time I met him, a year after that, he was backing into my loading dock with a truck half full (they aren't very big you know) of thin clients.
"This thin client thing was a disaster. It was okay for the first 3/4 of the rollout, but we kept having to add more servers and more staff to support the servers. The staff we could let go because we didn't have to do desktop hardware support was all cheap interns - we had to bring in a nearly equal number of highly paid and trained professionals to handle the new duties, nevermind the increased infrastructure costs. And to make things even worse, the energy consumption was shifted from the general office floor to the datacenter, where it became a 'concern' and now they want to charge our budget for our datacenter power consumption, because in comparison the rest of the organization is getting so much "greener"."
I'm meeting him again in a few weeks. He says he's bringing me a truckload of servers and network gear that they don't need in the datacenters anymore.