IDC analyst Bob O’Donnell as quoted in HP Thinks Thin

I’m hereby declaring 2008 as the Year of the Thin Client. In 2008, laptop vendors will begin lining up ducks as we all get ready to move to the cloud.

Andy Greenberg does a really great job explaining why the time for the thin client is now.

PC manufacturers pay their bills by selling new machines year after year with ever more impressive loads of storage and memory. But as the U.S. economy sputters and companies transfer their IT needs from the desktop to virtualized data centers and to the Web, one computer giant is moving its enterprise products in a new direction: slimmer and cheaper.

The only thing I think he got wrong is when he said “one computer giant is moving its enterprise products in a new direction.” I think they all are. I also predict they’ll come up with a new name to replace “thin client.” It’s too 90′s.