I rather like the idea of a dumb terminal, especially from a corporate point of view. At my company, ALL laptops are encrypted and in the event of a loss, we will pay for identity theft insurance for 1 year if any customer information was on the laptop. That is good for the customer but not necessarily good for the corporate bottom line.

Using a virtual structure where nothing is stored locally requires plenty of infrastructure and some up-front costs, but do you want to see your company on the MSN homepage as the latest to let personal information disappear?

I would also venture that if there were personal penalties for corporate employees losing laptops, some of those numbers would come down.