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There has been a lot of talk recently about how users are getting smarter and CIOs are losing control. This is the perfect opportunity for the rises of the employee-owned PC, powered by a mix of server-based computing, virtualization, and isolation technologies.

If you have Windows applications that users need to access, there are a lot of different ways you can do this: traditional installations, Citrix, VMware, Bladed PCs, Streaming, etc. This article takes a quick look at the options and mentions some quick pros and cons of each.

IBM, Citrix, and VMware are pushing the idea of providing desktops to users in the form of virtual machine-based remote Windows XP desktops instead of the traditional way of publishing a desktop session on a Terminal Server or Citrix Presentation Server. In this article, I'll take a brief look at the announcements from the past few weeks and then dig into the pros and cons of this architecture.

I wonder if Microsoft's decision to delay Bear Paw until the next platform release of Windows (probably 2007) is a "gift" to Citrix in return for Citrix choosing not to release a version of MetaFrame Presentation Server for Linux. It's actually more plausible than it seems if you dig into it.

The server-based computing industry is like the auto industry. Microsoft builds the car, and Citrix sells an upgrade. That worked fine for years, but now Citrix wants to grow beyond cars be the "transportation infrastructure" company.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the future of Citrix, especially now that Citrix is very openly trying to move beyond being a pure server-based computing company. Does this growth represent a product strategy or is it the result of throwing darts at high-value targets?

I used to think that server-based computing and .NET applications were in "competition" with each other and that Terminal Server was ultimately doomed. However, the more I think about Longhorn, the more I realize that the evolution of Terminal Server will help Microsoft implement their .NET vision.

Ron and I spent last week at the Microsoft MVP Global Summit. One of the things we talked about again and again was how surprised we were that Microsoft generally values our opinions and how different this is than the other large company we work with: Citrix.

Some major investment firms have recently published reports indicating that Citrix will have to compete with a fairly new technology concept called a "bladed PC." In this article, I look at what bladed PCs are and how their use will affect Citrix.

This is the third article in the series about VMware and Citrix and Terminal Server technologies. In this article, I look ahead to what EMC's purchase of VMware could mean, and how future solutions could be relevant in the server-based computing world.

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