How close is the Death of the PC?

Since I was asked to look in to Dell's newest addition to the Optiplex line up, the Optiplex 160 for our corporate environment, I thought about an article I read recently. It was in Forbes magazine with the ominous title of "The Death of the PC." The idea of the PC being dead has been long debated and still is hot subject to this day. There is a bigger threat then cell phones and laptops to the PC in the corporate world.

There is one thing that I see happening not just at my work place but even here at school. It is desktop virtualization. This is where the user thinks he or she is sitting at a PC but is in fact working off of a server some where else. My workplace uses this type of set up for all of our collection analysts. This has the advantage of lower equipment costs and greater data security.

Some have argued that there is a higher initial cost as you have to replace all the PCs with thin clients like Dell's new Optiplex 160. While this is true at first until you start amortizing the capital cost out. PCs are only good for about 4 years then your helpdesk cost start rising due to increased repair calls from the users. Some of the thin clients we still have in our environment are going on 10 years old and we are having to replace just because the technology will not connect with our new Citrix servers.
A quote from Forbes explains the difference between cloud computing and virtualization:

"It used to be that something virtual wasn't real. And that clouds were just that--those puffy things in the sky. Today we have the tech industry terms "virtual computing" and "cloud computing," which often get mixed up. Fortunately, there's an easy way to tell them apart, and it involves hearkening back to the age-old distinction between hardware and software. When you're talking about virtual computing, you're invariably talking about hardware; specifically, making PC-style hardware available to users in a new way. A new layer of software, typically running in a far-off data center, tricks users into thinking they are using a desktop PC like before.

Cloud computing, by contrast, usually refers to the sorts of software that run once a computer gets turned on. The "cloud" indicates that the software is hosted in a data center, not sitting on your desktop. If you use Google Docs instead of Microsoft Office for your word processing or spreadsheets, that's cloud computing. You can mix and match these two approaches, undertaking cloud computing on a nonvirtual, traditional PC. And the opposite: You can use traditional, Office-style programs on a virtual PC."

With the ease of just remotely resetting a users session, added to the the decreased costs of ownership coupled with data security, the PC is in a run for its life in the corporate world.