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What's So Good About Windows CE?
W indows CE has emerged virtually overnight as a very popular OS for thin-client computers and is expected to largely replace DOS and other proprietary operating systems in the Windows terminal market. Known primarily as a platform for palmtop computers, Windows CE 2.1 offers a very appealing platform for Windows terminal vendors but is not without significant flaws.

First among its positive attributes, Windows CE is compact enough to be stored in 4 MB of ROM, which makes booting CE-based thin clients fast and easy--there's no more fussing with boot servers. Second, CE provides a 32-bit multitasking environment, along with a Win32 development environment, that is familiar to programmers. CE also provides significant flexibility for vendors regarding their choice of CPU. Unlike Windows95 and, to a slightly lesser extent, NT--which are both tightly linked to the Intel x86 processor architecture--CE can run on x86, PowerPC and NEC/MIPS RISC processors. Finally, CE is viewed as a safe choice by vendors, one that, by virtue of Microsoft's endorsement, will let a large commodity-oriented market develop for thin clients.

But embracing CE as a platform for thin clients also has a downside. First, the conditions of Microsoft's OEM license agreement restricts vendors from supporting locally processed applications on their devices with the exception of terminal emulators. In other words, if you want to run Java-based applications or support Web browsing, that code is executed on the NT server and displayed on the client. While there are some management benefits associated with such an arrangement, these restrictions place an additional processing load on the server, which further undermines the already limited scalability of this architecture. We suspect that customer demand for locally processed applications will reduce some of the appeal of WBTs or force Microsoft to re-evaluate its position.

The second problem relates to performance. On identical hardware, older Windows terminals running the ICA protocol outperform CE-based WBTs running ICA or Microsoft's RDP protocol. It is difficult to say whether the bottleneck lies within the CE kernel or the TCP/IP stack, but the performance differences are noticeable and should be addressed by Microsoft.