Back in February when Microsoft announced that Windows 7 SP1 was being released to manufacture, it also announced Windows Thin PC (WinTPC) a new lightweight edition of Windows 7. I can’t say that I was impressed back then, and now that Microsoft has offered up its release candidate, I think that my first impressions were spot on.
At the time it was announced, Microsoft’s big claim for WinTPC was that it will “allow customers to re-purpose their existing PCs as thin clients”, which while true is hardly groundbreaking stuff. Thin client vendor Wyse has offered its own low cost solution to do the same for years. More recently though, Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Microsoft’s director of product management for desktop virtualization, came out with this gem on The Windows Blog.
Customers like the reduced footprint of WinTPC. The machines they will likely use it on often have less disk space than brand-new machines, and WinTPC helps to ensure they will have adequate space.
Well that’s very nice, but is relevant? A standard Windows 7 Professional Edition installation requires a little under 7 GB of disk space. The thing is, I had to look back to 2002 until I could find a mainstream business PC that shipped with anything smaller than a 40 GB disk. Surely Ms Alexion-Tiernan would not have us believe that any machine still in use today won’t have a hard disk capable of installing a standard version of Windows 7. Do we really need a cut down version of Windows 7 just to accommodate less than brand-new machines? Can Ms Alexion-Tiernan actually produce a single customer that actually needs WinTPC’s smaller install footprint, or is this Microsoft searching for a problem to fit its solution.
Microsoft certainly has a problem. New PC sales witnessed a dramatic dip with the initial introduction of the Apple iPad, and although numbers are recovering now it is by no means clear that this will last. As new, more capable, and importantly more enterprise friendly tablets enter the market (I’m looking at Cisco and RIM to deliver here), PCs and laptops will see a decline in key verticals, such as healthcare, where mobility is at a premium. At the same time, the impact of more affordable desktop virtualization platforms, BYOD, SaaS, DaaS, and the imminent introduction of Google’s Chrome laptop are causing many CIOs to question their long-term desktop strategy. This all comes at a time when Microsoft is approaching the midpoint of the Windows 7 development life-cycle with little in the pipeline to encourage thought about the move to Windows Next. With that background; I rather think that this is little more than another attempt by Microsoft to extend the “value” of Software Assurance to those customers who might consider jumping off the bandwagon having realized that SA offers only limited value to organizations looking to implement desktop virtualization. WinTPC sounds less like a enterprise friendly desktop virtualization endpoint and more like a the wheezing breath of a soon-to-be dying man.
I feel slightly guilty saying knocking WinTPC this way. As a product WinTPC isn’t bad. In many respects I’d suggest that it could be the preferred Windows platform for a significant number of enterprises. It’s lightweight, svelte even (thanks Gabe); fast, manageable, has everything that you need out of enterprise desktop platform. Unfortunately WinTPC’s has been encumbered with a licensing agreement that is absolutely hostile to adoption by anyone.
The official licensing terms are not yet released, and won’t be until WinTPC ships for real, however Microsoft have made no secret of what we would find embedded within it.
According to the WinTPC FAQ you can only run applications that fall into the following categories:
- Remote desktop clients
- Management
- Security
- Media Players
That means, you can’t run Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera. These are all browsers, but with the exception of Internet Explorer, which Microsoft would have us believe is not an application but a part of the operating system, all browsers are applications and are therefore excluded from the list of permitted applications. You will still be able to use IE as a means of redirecting Web browsing activities to the endpoint for local execution, but only if your Web app is compatible with IE 8 or higher. As I covered previously, running the IE 6 rendering engine on Windows 7 is possible through the use of Browsium’s UniBrows; but UniBrows is an application and therefore cannot be run on WinTPC.
Other activities that you might wish to perform on the desktop such as viewing .PDF files is no longer the trivial task that used to be. The Adobe Acrobat Reader is an application and forbidden. Users of Adobe’s other ubiquitous platform also have a problem. Is Flash a media player, an integrated application execution environment, or both? Microsoft aren’t saying. And speaking of media players where does Apple’s iTunes fit. Yes it is a media player, but it’s also a great deal more than that, it’s an e-commerce application, digital library, and mobile device management tool. Does Microsoft expect IT departments to police iTune’s use so that listening to music is permitted but using iTunes to synchronize an iPhone is not, or would it require that iTunes is installed on a virtual desktop. And let’s not forget that this nonsense applies equally to Microsoft’s own Zune software which is the distribution engine for updates to Microsoft’s own Windows phone 7 platform and its recent Skype acquisition.
What troubles me most here isn’t that Microsoft has once again made a mess of licensing a desktop virtualization component, it’s that when the penny drops the reaction will be the same as last time. Rather than relaxing controls and encouraging adoption it will tighten controls and drive people further away. The trouble is, when you start with a EULA as unfriendly as this, the only way to make it worse is to ban the use of mice and keyboards. I rather expect that Microsoft’s team of legal experts that ultimately take responsibility for crafting the fine details of WinTPC’s licensing terms to create some form of words that will allow Microsoft to weasel its way out of any claims of anticompetitive practices, but ultimately it probably won’t really matter. No one will complain, because to complain will be to admit to being suckered into using WinTPC in the first place.
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