I wish something like HDBaseT would catch on.
You could take that even further by adding in a custom SPICE-like display protocol and only send rectangular regions of changed pixels and translation commands to shift a region of pixels around (scrolling, moving a window, etc). Given it's all virtualized instead of traditional ip phones you could go with dumb USB desk phones and route that USB device to a single PBX and build something akin to an old school PBX where the phones are more or less just dumb terminals. Rather than dealing with the headaches of setting up BLFs, dial plans on the phone vs. PBX, call forwarding and DND on PBX and phones, VM access, Hotdesking setups, etc it's all just a bunch of specialized HIDs hooked up to a VM. Need HA? Move the USB devices on failover to a separate VM.
It'd have all the benefits of thin clients with significantly less drawbacks. Need dual monitors? No need to replace your bargain basement thin client with one that supports dual monitors, just pull up another monitor, hookup to the same seat on the servers and done. You could sell a deluxe version with dual inputs so that each display is connected to two independent switches so if one bites the dust it doesn't take down 48 employees at a time.
> HDBaseT, promoted and advanced by the HDBaseT Alliance, is a consumer electronic (CE) and commercial connectivity standard for transmission of uncompressed high-definition video (HD), audio, power, home networking, Ethernet, USB, and some control signals, over a common category cable (Cat5e or above) using the same 8P8C modular connectors used by Ethernet.
Also, the 8P8C connector is just godawful. I mean, it's fine for the first 3 days until the clip breaks off.
Hasn't this been largely fixed by connectors that have a cover over the exposed clip?