With the widely acceptance of the thin client concept, more and more functions have been pushed into the servers; the local computer or the local client becomes quite thin. In a typical thin-client scenario, a user only uses a browser (or a similar client) to access the Internet; other applications are rarely used. Such computer usage pattern makes high-end personal computers with super speed and huge memory less attractive, and it could have reduced the market driving force for the further development of computer hardware technology. According to a recent Gartner report, worldwide personal computer shipments totaled 68.4 million units in the second quarter of 2015, a 9.5 percent dip from the second quarter of 2014. Some articles are discussing whether personal computers are destined for extinction.
With huge amount of computing power available in personal computers, I believe it is a good time for the fat client concept to come back. When fat clients come back, they should not be called fat clients again; they should bear a new name: Dew Computing. The key difference between fat clients and dew computing is that dew computing are fat clients collaborated with central servers in natural ways.
The initial definition of Dew Computing could be:
Dew Computing is a personal computer software organization paradigm in the age of Cloud Computing. Its goal is to fully realize the potentials of personal computers and cloud services. In this paradigm, software on a personal computer is organized according to the Cloud-dew Architecture; in this paradigm, a local computer provides rich functionality independent of cloud services and also collaborates with cloud services.
Dew Computing has a great potential and could influence the future direction of computer hardware and software, including operating systems and browsers. The key feature of Dew Computing is micro services in collaboration with macro services, or dew services in collaboration with cloud services.
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