Are Enterprise tablets simply dumb terminals to PCs?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Microsoft-Is-Closer-To-siliconalley-2183561497.html?x=0&.v=2
Even if Apple owns the tablet market, Holt says Microsoft is picking up $100 per unit in revenue from enterprises using iPads. How? Holt says, “Where iPads are being deployed, corporates are often leveraging virtual desktops to provision Windows and Windows apps. MSFT generally gets $100/device in this scenario.”
I was surprised by how expensive a virtual desktop license is to an enterprise. But even more surprising was that a device like an iPad with so much computational horsepower, connectivity, and a magical user experience is simply a fancy monitor to a PC sitting inside the enterprise. Reminds me of the early days of Windows where a high quality terminal emulator (HyperTerm) was a built in Windows app that allowed users to connect to their “real” computer, the mainframe inside the enterprise.
Despite the broad interest in remote desktop software today, it is clear the future remains with more powerful mobile devices with lots of compute horsepower and storage. The display and keyboard will come via docking. The Motorola Atrix, a smartphone that docks into a laptop, is an existing glimpse into the future where our mobiles dock into shared display and input systems. Corning has a futuristic video of ”a day made of glass” where many of their examples revolve around mobile devices docking with glass displays in places you never expected.
