Entitlement: remember your place in the world

I am convinced there is a natural tendency to feel entitled. This sense of entitlement is silly and we should avoid/mitigate it while we can.

I was out at a bar this evening with one of my friends. During the day we had been chatting and he mentioned how excited he was that he was finally getting a work laptop from his high tech company. Apparently this took some kind of action from a VP.

Naturally when I first heard this excitement I blew it off. I had "assumed" that most companies offer employee's laptops as part of the hiring process for any type of "knowledge worker" position.

After driving home from the office today (my laptop safely tucked into its carseat) I realized how much computing power was going to waste on me and various other "knowledge workers". Here I have a nice new Fujitsu Lifebook (complete with a nice AMD Turion mobile processor) but I also have a Blackberry and then at home I have my Apple Macbook Pro.

With all of this power I am going to do a grand total of 5 tasks this evening:

1. Email / Calendaring (Microsoft Outlook)
• I check my mail daily in the evening and clean up loose ends
• Checking / Printing my Calendar for when I travel
  
2. Powerpoint (Microsoft PowerPoint)
• Reviewing a preso being used for a meeting with strategic customers
• Writing my 2H2007 goals and plan
  
3. Uploading pictures from a flight excursion I took a couple weeks ago with friends
4. Blog something
5. Do my expense reports and organize the receipts
   

Do I really need such powerful technology from my laptops with the complete functionality they provide? I say no, what I really need is a properly developed ecosystem of "thin" edge devices that provide me with gateways into resources of very powerful technology stacks that are managed by someone else.

The wave of thin and managed client solutions is coming fast. Citrix and the Windows Terminal Server world have ruled the software side of the thin client for sometime with a great deal of innovation happening at the server layers. When you mentioned "Thin Client Hardware" to me last year all I could tell you about was the Wyse boxes I had seen.

In 2007/2008 we will be seeing the actual "client" innovation start to show up from the likes of Teradici, Microsoft and VMWare. AMD has been in the "thin client" game for quite some time with our Geode processor line. I can promise you that we are working hard to make sure we provide solutions to empower this market.

With a software infrastructure enhancing the client side to work with new layers of hardware form factor there should come a day where user's don't feel an entitlement to have the latest and greatest processors sitting on their desk and instead can trust those computing resources to be distributed appropriately to data centers and left in the hands of IT Professionals.

Let's face it, for most of us the most complicated technology we really need is our Blackberry and our TiVo.