The Wyse Winterm Challenge Survey

Winmark Wyse® Winterm™Challenge Research Results, October 2004

Winmark, a top market research company in the UK, oversaw a "blind test" with over 100 users, on their usage and acceptance of thin clients vs. PCs -- 7 out of 10 users prefer thin clients over PCs!

Key Research Objectives
The many benefits to an organization of deploying a thin-client architecture have been documented by a number of industry-leading analysts. Some of the many benefits noted include costs savings, improved security due to centralization and improved business continuity. One of the key barriers, however, is end-user resistance – often, PC users feel that thin clients are in some way inferior and that they will ‘lose’ something when they move to a thin-client machine.

In order to address this key problem, a pioneering piece of research was undertaken to determine whether differences would be evident as the result of direct user experience. This would involve asking typical business desktop users to conduct every day tasks on a PC and a thin client, but the two different desktop machines would be hidden from view. This would result in a true user perception of a thin client versus a PC as a device to help them accomplish their work. All the obvious psychological factors that result in any user prejudice against thin clients would be removed. In order to make the results credible, it was essential to ensure that the research was conducted independently, and that the results be statistically robust.

With this in mind, the key research objective of the Winterm Challenge was:

To produce a statistically robust comparison between experiences of using a Wyse thin client vs. using a traditional PC.

The following document, prepared by Winmark, details the research methodology, materials and equipment used to achieve this objective, as well as revealing the final results.