>>>NCD? Wyse? Are you kidding?
Look at what Wyse says in this release anyway: This upgrade capability, combined with the performance breakthrough, makes the new Winterm 2000 Series members the ideal Windows-based terminal choice for use either with Citrix ICA or RDP protocol connections. <<<
No Tom, I'm not kidding. I raised before the issue that it is not a difficult technical job to produce a protocol like ICA, it's been done with X by three different vendors and they all performed better in LANs than ICA. This is well documented. It's been done using Java applets, and Insignia had better technology than ICA with Keoke - both local and remote connections - surprise surprise, Citrix bought it up.
Now there's RDP from Microsoft, and the only thing stopping Microsoft from taking it all back IS THEIR WILL TO SEE IT THROUGH.
Let's not fool ourselves that in a long-term battle for the thin client that the better product will win; Apple had a better operating system more than a decade before Windows 95 was released, and look what happened to them against Microsoft. There is absolutely no reason why Microsoft should not be able to equal or better ICA's performance. Yes, there are other features that Microsoft have to catch up on, but the majority of the market doesn't need most of them.
Then why would anyone want to buy from a middleman what they can get from a standard out-of-the-box NT server?
Here's another bunch of questions for you:
1) If Microsoft make RDP available in NT Workstation, will Citrix get a license to connect? I don't say that will happen soon, but it could.
2) What premium will users have to pay to get ICA compared with RDP? Think big, like per-seat costs for 5,000 users!
3) Citrix milked hundreds of dollars per seat for WinFrame. I don't know what their royalties are for NT3.51, but I bet not much, it was a license to print money. Who knows what Citrix's pricing scheme is going to be like?
4) What happens when a customer can get "just good enough" performance from Hydra/RDP, for not a penny more than the base server from Microsoft?
5) What royalties are Microsoft asking Wyse to pay for RDP connections/clients? Is it less than what Citrix extract from Wyse?
6) Microsoft might find out something that the big iron vendors have known since time immemorial: that the license fees they get from BackOffice deployments through thin clients are worth more in profits than Windows and Office on fat PCs. Whoopee, "Thin'll be in", fat clients will be for mobiles and byteheads, and bye bye thin protocol competitors. Er, oh, there's only one, isn't there?
Let's not get blindly over-zealous about a company that got lucky once - it may not last...
Have a nice evening.
Ray |
