IT depts to dump XP

Dear Sir, I agree with Martin Courtney (p12) that IT departments need to dump XP before the end of official support, however I profoundly disagree that we should automatically move to W7.

We have four years to plan and implement the strategy for this. I hate the phrase “web 2.0” almost as much as “DotCom” from history, but what web 2.0 has shown is how far the browser has come on as a method of interacting with applications. In short most desktop, installed applications are dead and their descendants should be web based.

As part of the IT strategy, large IT users should be informing their suppliers now that they will move to a competitor if the next major release is not browser based, and I do mean standards compliant, non-specific browser based.

Desktop virtualisation and semi thin clients allow a minimal os to be installed with the browser as the main application. A minimal Linux install would boot from flash, authenticate via ldap, share home directories over nfs or securely over sshfs, run OpenOffice and Firefox/Chrome from a remote mounted filesystem with user applications through a browser.

Legacy applications which still rely on windows can be run with VMware Remote Connect or RDP/VNC from a windows server.

Power consumption for a flash based pc is minimal and licencing can be next to nothing depending on the choice of Linux used.

Virtualisation concepts presents a whole new way to approach desktops, but we can go a step further with technology which exists now (I do this on my work desktop), four years is long enough to plan and implement this. Let's start now!