Complicating the issue is the way OSes will be changing to the point that trying to define a thick vs thin client will be hard.

7 July 2005, Cambridge, UK – Newnham Research has secured $8m Series B financing from two of the leading global venture capital firms: Atlas Venture and Benchmark.

The announcement comes as the company, who are developing powerful new ways of connecting displays to computers, prepare to launch their first products with a selected group of international partners.

Of course MS – Scoble – anyone-with-a-vested-desktop-interest will focus on the outlier situations (at least outlier compared to mainstream needs) — traveling & designing, in this case.

But in the end, as Christensen modeled for us, the new, inferior tech will eat away at discarded lower-end markets until it can satisfy enough needs of enough customers to cause a massive customer shift away from the incumbent to the new technology.

Do I want to spend my entire day in a thin client? No, not as long as I am playing my ITunes, working with PowerPoint and checking my Outlook.

By the same token, the percentage of my day that is spent in a web browser continues to increase. And through programming methodologies like Ajax and the emergence of rich messaging pub/sub models around RSS, the thin experience is getting a whole lot better.

Plus, let’s not forget the fact that the trend on new applications developed is decidedly towards building a web variant first and then maybe extending the app to a richer fat client for power users.

The reasons are obvious. It’s quicker, cheaper and easier to launch and iterate on the developer side and its quicker, cheaper and easier for the consumer to try before buying.

Not an all or none, but the gravitational pull is pretty clear.

Coincidentally (or maybe not so) in the past week, I’ve been in a few conversations about more and more apps coming to a browser near you enabled by Ajax – namely an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. Paolo Massa is working on AjaxOffice an…

Google seems to recognize this too with their rich-client entries. Also, there are times when you are disconnected from the network. What’s the alternative there?

I know there’s lots of poo-pooing of Windows OS, but the simple fact is that it runs on most people’s machines and there lots of stuff coming down the road (in the short term), that will make deployment of rich-client apps easier via the net or web. I can see the flames coming now, so I’m outtie here ;)

Everything wrong with PCs that don’t really do anything more than they did 10 years ago.

If there has been any growth at all in terms of functionality, it has been on the web+browser front. And if that is the case…

think about the thin client in a post broadband era. if you look at the first generation of thin clients, they were bandwidth starved underpowered machines that pretended to be PCs.

the new generation thin clients are going to be seriously popular in emerging world, where pipes are fatter and wallets thinner.

Om Malik says “Scoble is wrong about thin clients.”