Scott McNealy made a big deal about how people could use a Java SmartCard and log into a “dumb” Sun Ray workstation and have their own desktop come up as he spoke in Singapore during a recent everyone-else-bashing session.

One of my most vivid memories of the last JavaOne conference I attended was all the Sun Ray workstations synchronously crashing and rebooting because of a misconfigured server–a server configured by a Sun engineer. If they couldn't take light usage in the press room at Java One–arguably an ideal setting for this sort of computing–how would they do on corporate desktops?

Imagine a corporate exec swiping his smart card, and trying to pull up data from a spreadsheet, only to have his (and everyone else on the floor's) system reboot like a stuck elevator door for fifteen minutes. Now, that's real enterprise computing.