>Al, servers are getting bigger and bolder, but so are local PCs which is the point I made earlier. And still you can hobble a $250K SS2008 server with heavy munging unless you use resource governor (something that presumably was added because people apart from me have experienced resource overloading ;-) ) in which case the customer has to learn to wait when they never had to before. Why? Because it's better to do it on the server?
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>Of course there are other examples where doing everything on the server is a better idea. Nobody has ever disagreed with that.

I was mainly pointing out that things have changed, a lot, since a few years ago. Taking that theme a little further, the near future offers cloud computing, which you can consider the ultimate back end. For all but the largest organizations, server scaling is essentially unlimited if a suitable cloud back end is available.

Sure, it's possible to devise scenarios where doing everything on the backend, or on workstations, is dumb. In a perfect world, a smart network would automatically load balance and make best use of all resources (both server and workstation) but AFAIK we're not there yet.

ISTR at one point you were spreading the gospel of the workstation being dead, and the future being everyone using smartphones attached to sessions in a cloud somewhere. Has anything happened to give you new respect for workstations (like, say, an overloaded server? ;-))