I’m always surprised – not to say, a little saddened – by how hard companies find it to make the whole concept of “thin clients” work.

When you are whiteboarding your company strategy, the pitch which accompanies the thin client concept always sounds attractive. You can deal with 90-plus per cent of most people’s daily grind with a tiny fraction of the horsepower shipped in a netbook, never mind anything in a regular desktop case.

Microsoft clearly has this idea very much in mind because when Bill Laing  demonstrated Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop VDI (which to you and me, is remote computing with a whole virtual machine to yourself, inside a super-quick server running off the network), he made significant use of a ThinLinx, a little emerald-coloured box that drew only three watts of power.

What seems to prevent companies from using these little wonders is one of four factors. The first, Microsoft feels is it is addressing in the new feature set of Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop. RemoteFX means you can put a high-powered graphics chipset in the server and it will do the hard parts of 3D rendering in a display-hungry application. That’s cool, though from hints at the end of the presentation, it sounds like only those with deep pockets and big problems will use it  – only two guest VDI machines per server-side render-friendly graphics card, sounds like a hard sell for the rest of us.

The second problem is that almost nobody has a completely green field for this type of computing, and pretty much everyone can recycle old PCs as thin clients, more cheaply than they can buy new.

The third is thin clients keep on turning up with just that bit too much taken out – so the little emerald box had VGA analogue out and HDMI, but no DVI.

The fourth killer problem is that there’s some stuff that just won’t pass through a client/server Remote Desktop (formerly known as Terminal Services) session all that reliably.

Chief amongst that type of traffic is voice and video. Lots of demonstrations during TechEd show that Microsoft is pouring brainpower into those areas – the Silverlight streaming video player responding seamlessly to an artificial bandwidth choke in mid-play was especially impressive – but as ever, the real gems were to be found down on the show floor.

I was drawn to an inconspicuous stand in the Microsoft zone by what looked like a trapper’s rack of pelts; once I had my varifocals on I realised it was a display of a variety of third-party VoIP telephones. This was the Microsoft Communications Server “14″ booth, and yes they did put the number in quotes themselves: given how recent the inception of Communications Server is, 14 is most likely not a version achieved by iterated increments.

The clear implication from cross-examining the product guru on the stand was that Microsoft would very much prefer everyone to make calls via a softphone. In fact, Microsoft would very much prefer that people ignore the surrounding industry FUD about network requirements for VoIP, and just let the server work it all out. That said, the array of things closely resembling a telephone was impressive; personally I find VoIP as a marketplace a bit too ready to claim cross-platform standards when in fact it’s all locked-down and proprietary.

It was while looking at Polycom USB-only handset units that I discovered Communciator “14″ came on phone devices running Windows Embedded – and that there’s an Xbox 360 version. I am famous in my Terminal Services/Remote Desktop deployments for trying to run the oldest or strangest thin or semi-thin client I can muster: my next SSD homebrew project will be an Apple G4 Cube, built principally for Remote Desktop client duties. Getting an Xbox 360 just for communicator would probably be foolish, so I immediately asked when the Xbox RDP client would be out; at which point I got that classic “you might ask that, but I couldn’t possibly comment” look from my cornered guru.

Would this be a credible “daily driver” device? What’s the oddest “thin client” machine you’ve managed to get running?