General Consultant Discussion

Meet the future of computing.

Rent the equivalent of a ten-year-old computer for a price that would pay for a new one every year???

The fine print: If you have used WorkSpaces Connect to connect to an existing Active Directory, you can configure one of your existing printers on a user's WorkSpace, and they can continue to print as normal. Local printing is not currently supported.

This offer is going to get better and better and better. Never worse. More memory. More speed. More convenience. Less cost.

Is this designed to be a server, or just some kind of desktop replacement? But so are desktop/laptop PC's. Nobody is going to go without any PC as you need a PC to connect to this PC and you need one when working offline. So whats the purpose? Also interesting that it's only office 2010 and not 2013. Wonder if the new Office 365 licensing makes that impossible and thus overtime this outdated version of office is going to be problematic. Has anybody actually tried this? How easy is it moving files back and fourth from their cloud and your drive and is their built in syncing?

I believe desktop replacement - and you make a good point that for file sharing you're probably not going to have all the components of a full blown central server storage. However how many companies are forgoing central storage and using something like DropBox or Onedrive, etc? The need for servers starts to blur or become less clear with each passing day. There are a lot of good questions. what if hypothetically the bring-your-own-device trend continued toward desktop/laptops. As part of a job you were expected to be able to use your device and that device connected through to your workspace. Eventually I suspect Google will introduce $399 Chromebooks that connect (if they don't already have this).

I just guess there will be some market for this, especially with smaller companies who don't want full time IT personnel and who are very geographically dispersed. But other than hardware failure, which is pretty rare, I don't see why these virtual machines won't need any more or less IT support than a laptop on your desk. It's no different then using remote desktop to access your home computer. Is the home computer suddenly immune to IT complexity because the mouse, keyboard and screen is remote? Plus, amazon's firewalls and stuff are probably alot harder to navigate to connect that desktop to multiple server apps running in multiple hosts since there is clearly no all dominating cloud hosting company? I still see running a business with multiple cloud hosts with apps that should be integrated, being more expensive and more complicated than just running it on-premise with a quality Virtual server and an EverSafe! hybrid cloud backup for Disaster Recovery.