“Many people, especially in corporate IT, will say: ‘Once I move to the cloud, I’m only going to use thin clients.’ I don’t believe that at all,” asserted Mircosoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently at the software company’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, DC.

Never one to avoid controversy, the outspoken Ballmer stated in no uncertain terms his belief that the widespread adoption of cloud computing – in which the company has invested heavily – will by no means signal the death of increasingly sophisticated client hardware.

“Time and time again, we have seen the advantage of the rich client,” he declared. “And we see that today. We see it with PCs, we see it with smartphones… People are actually trying to build devices to bring more intelligence down to the rich client. The world of tomorrow is a world of smart cloud talking to smart devices.”

Ballmer’s speech coincided with news from Fujitsu of an expanded partnership with the software giant. Fujitsu will deliver a series of new cloud services based on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform appliance, which will be deployed at Fujitsu data centres around the world, starting in Japan this year.

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