Thin Is In
17th February 2026
If you wanted to make a case for thin clients, you could argue that mobile devices are a hybrid; after all, the rise of mobile benefited from and drove the rise of the cloud: nearly every app on a phone connects to a server somewhere. Ultimately, however, mobile devices are themselves thick clients: they are very capable computers in their own right, that certainly benefit from being connected to a server, but are useful without it. Critically, the server component is just data: the actual interface is entirely local.
You can make the same argument about SaaS apps: on one hand, yes, they operate in the cloud and are usually accessed via a browser; on the other hand, the modern browser is basically an operating system in its own right, and the innovations that made SaaS apps possible were the fact that interactive web apps could be downloaded and run locally. Granted, this isn’t far off from Sun’s vision (although the language ended up being JavaScript, not Java), but you still need a lot of local compute to make these apps work.
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