The PC Counterrevolution

We’re now three decades into the personal-computer revolution, and you’d think that by this point these devices would be as easy to operate as a toaster. Yet think about how much trouble it is to use a PC: the weird freezes and glitches and crashes, the shutting down and waiting for the thing to boot back up, the hassles connecting to printers and networks. It’s nuts.

Pity the poor folks who work in corporate IT departments, managing hundreds or even thousands of these flaky devices across a company. Keeping a fleet of PCs updated and running smoothly is a chore. And in addition to the official applications that the company distributes to its employees, there are loads of other little programs that people have downloaded on their own. “Some companies have 5,000 or 10,000 applications in their environment,” says Gavriella Schuster, general manager of Windows products at Microsoft.

Now some companies are overhauling their computer systems in an attempt to gain more control. “Desktop virtualization” is the name for this approach, and basically it means that instead of installing a bunch of programs on each desktop, you run everything on servers in the data center and let individuals pull down the applications they need.

To users, the experience feels the same. Better yet, no matter where you are, whether at home or on the road or in the office, you can connect to the data center and pull up all of your files. For the IT department, virtualization reduces the headache of managing the system. Desktop virtualization “has become a big deal over the past 18 months because organizations realize that they’ve reached the limits of the infrastructure as they have it today,” Schuster says.

Microsoft is promoting virtualization to customers, estimating that companies save an average of $81 per desktop per year by adopting a virtualized system. There’s some irony here, since Microsoft is the company that started this whole mess, with Bill Gates and his vision of “a computer on every desk.”

The move to a more centralized computing is in many ways a return to how things used to be in the age of mainframes, when computing took place back in the data center, and the thing on your desk was just a dumb terminal. Then came the personal-computer revolution, and things were better in some ways—end users had more control—but the revolution has spiraled into chaos and the pendulum is swinging back.

Telus, the Canadian telecom company, used software from VMware to roll out easy-to-manage virtual desktops for 1,000 customer-service reps who work from their homes. The IT department installs patches and updates in the data center, rather than on all those separate machines. The project has gone so well that Telus now aims to virtualize 18,000 desktops for employees working in Telus offices, says Chris Renter, manager of the company’s IT architecture.

Another thing driving the switch is Windows 7, the new operating system from Microsoft. A lot of companies want to move from Windows XP to Windows 7, but they have hundreds or even thousands of applications running on XP that can’t run on Windows 7. One way around this problem is to “virtualize” the applications—basically, wrap them in a bit of code so they can run on any operating system. “Companies want to modernize their desktop architecture and reduce their operational costs, so they’re using this migration to Windows 7 as an opportunity to do that,” says Raj Mallempati, a marketing director at VMware.

But virtualization is not a panacea. The technology is costly and complex, and companies can’t expect a quick return on their investment, says Ian Song, an analyst at market researcher IDC. And it does seem wrong somehow to be spending yet more money to make up for the shortcomings of the personal computer itself.

There is, at least in theory, another way to fix this mess. Instead of leaping through hoops to make personal computers more manageable, why not just start out with less complicated devices? I’ve spent the past few weeks using Apple’s iPad. It’s much less powerful than a traditional personal computer and can run only one application at a time. But it has one huge advantage: it’s dead simple. Over the next decade I expect we’ll see this and other devices like it being put to use in corporations, turning the personal computer, as we know it today, into a dinosaur. Frankly, we’ll all be better off.

Daniel Lyons is also the author of Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs and Dog Days: A Novel.