It is widely acknowledged that many technologies start out in the consumer world and eventually find their way into businesses, often because they prove to be so useful that workers sneak them in via the back door to help with their jobs.

In recent years, removable storage devices, such as USB Flash drives, have gone through this cycle, but before them it was handhelds and smartphones, and long before that it was the PC platform. OK, the PC was more of a small business product, but it too was initially scorned by large firms before eventually being embraced.

Now, however, it looks like the PC platform is about to see a major divergence between enterprise systems and those aimed at smaller businesses and home users. In the future, the PC may physically exist only as a consumer item.

There are several trends that point to this possible scenario. Firstly, Microsoft has started to produce versions of its operating systems tailored to appeal specifically to consumers, such as Windows XP Media Centre edition.

But what really points the way towards divergence is virtualisation, specifically in the sense of the word that Citrix uses it. To Citrix, virtualisation means separating the user interface from wherever the applications happen to be running.

This is already seen in Citrix Presentation Server, but the company is soon to release Citrix Desktop Server, a new product that lets users connect to either a traditional server-hosted desktop session or to their own virtual machine running Windows XP.

Blade PC firm ClearCube Technology is taking a similar path, enabling users to work on virtual PCs hosted in a datacentre. Microsoft has also said that its forthcoming Longhorn Server will enable users to remotely connect to virtual PCs via Terminal Services.

Currently, consolidating desktop PCs into virtual machines is a somewhat exotic architecture that has niche appeal, in part because it requires more server resources to host entire virtual PCs than to host standard user desktop accounts.

Nevertheless, it seems possible that at some point in the future it may become more desirable to host user sessions this way, possibly because it makes management easier, but more likely because regulatory compliance legislation forces data access to be locked down ever tighter.

If this comes to pass, then real-life metal and plastic PCs may cease to exist in big firms, except for those power users that need to run workstation applications. We could end up with something like the old mainframe model of the datacentre – hopefully without losing the benefit of each having our own PC environment, however.