Prejudiced against the thin

...what wouldn't have happened if someone hadn't been able to take their computer home. There is no data on these. There is no drive, there is no CD-ROM. We are the preferred solution right now for HIPAA compliance.

What geographical regions are driving demand?
We are going to see the greatest growth coming in Asia. That will then be followed by Europe and then, finally, North America. When I took the helm nine months ago and we looked underneath at the numbers, we saw it coming in Asia. So first we shifted 50 percent of the company's work force to serve the Asian market. We opened up development centres in Bangalore and Beijing and really have gone about trying to get the resources as close to the market as we can. We literally had no one in India on 1 January and now we have 140.

Now, obviously these markets are going to have different drivers. They are incredibly price-sensitive. So we are designing products which will be tailored to specific Asian markets and which will carry much lower price points than our typical product if they were selling in the UK, the US or Germany.

What do your products sell for now?
The lowest-price product that we sell is right around $225 (£126) at volume. It runs our own proprietary operating system, which by itself accounts for 20 percent of the overall market. People use it because it's very, very fast. It takes 3s to boot up. I think a top-end model is probably about $700, but that's a very specific product that does video stream decoding. The government and other brokerages and other people are buying those.

Would $225 include a monitor?
That's just the box itself. The challenge of course is how do you bring down that price point where it becomes interesting inside India or China, where $100 is an upper limit for what people are really looking to spend. There are a number of initiatives we've taken, including taking the entire thin client and putting it on a single chip. This will be coming out next year. This will allow us to drop the overall cost precipitously. In fact, the chips will become embedded just in the back of the monitors, so there won't even be a cigar box anymore.

Thin-client guys always tout the lower cost of ownership. How do your products compare to PCs on that scale?
Forrester and others have done these studies and they basically show that the total cost of ownership is anywhere from 40 percent to 60 percent less for a thin client versus a PC, and the real reason for that is just manageability. Very, very rarely do you find a well-managed PC in a corporate environment.

It's too hard to do. People put their own applications on it. People decide they want to play solitaire. People put chess programs on it. They don't do the upgrade when they are supposed to. They don't back up their network.

A big emphasis right now is on the federal government, especially in secure agencies. There are other things going on, too. Japan, on 1 April, passed a law...

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