Not surprising, there is a decent value proposition in buying a thin client and leasing online compute.
Certainly you can get a used PC for less but most new PCs start at $500 with limited storage. Getting a fully functional PC for $X/month could work for certain values of X.
One of the biggest value proposition would be that Microsoft will take care of keeping it working and backing up your data. That's a huge sell if they can make it work.
You would probably need a very good network connection. I don't think this would work for non-stationary laptops.
I don't think the idea is to stream a windows session ala vnc, rdp, citrix, etc.
What they're trying to do is to migrate the OS itself into something that can run on a browser and interact with the windows cloud vía xhr calls. webassembly makes this wholy possible.
this is how office 365 works, it's not windows office software streamed to your computer,it's office ported to the browser and cloud is your storage.
> Build on Windows 365 to enable a full Windows operating system system streamed from the cloud to any device.
I interpreted that as a remote desktop session of some sort, but maybe some day it will look more like you're suggesting. It is the word "full" that sways me this way.
I don't know how I feel about booting an OS (Linux, MacOS, Windows) to open an OS (actually a browser) that runs the OS (Windows Online) though. Every time I say it though, I realize we're already pretty close.
I just bought a hybrid smart-tv computer monitor and it has some form of office on it. I haven't logged in to use it, but I'm sure it's just a web browser that renders content from Azure. I don't want them to succeed, but it might actually work for many customers that just use social media and web. They're just re-inventing "mobile apps" for the desktop.
W365 enterprise is really nice. I actually provisioned one in a personal tenant for myself recently. For me, $80/m to not have to think about a physical windows box ever again is a pretty easy sale.
If you prefer to work on Apple hardware and absolutely must use Windows, this currently feels like the best possible arrangement. Your MacBook is the only machine you ever need to touch again.
The privacy stuff doesn't really work on me anymore. Too many security edges and other things I already don't take care of with a physical box. I am not adding much value by keeping this stuff in my house vs in the cloud.
The final nail in my windows machine coffin is the fact that I don't play games anymore. I much prefer portability & assurance over anything else. My house could completely burn down and I could be back online the moment I have a new machine in hand without a single byte of data or user session state being lost.
It's both. I was part of many conversations starting around ~2005 or so where business owners wanted to convert to a subscription model to prevent piracy. You see it everywhere now.
I wouldn't put it past those slimeballs to release "Microsoft Linux" that has all the FOSS command line tools but still runs in the cloud and/or relies on the insecure windows codebase.
Since this move would make (advanced) user experience worse, it sounds very realistic to me.
Had they suddenly say "Windows 11 was a big mistake, we are moving back to Windows 7 experience, HTML-based pseudo-UIs are banned" etc. - now that would sound unrealistic.
Microsoft has been increasingly moving to the cloud. The last update of Outlook changed it from a local application, to one that is through the edge browser. Absolutely awful. Eventually, I had to edit the registry to prevent it from force updating to the web browser option.
The Mac version of this, if you switch to the "new Outlook" looses the ability to connect to an Exchange server, which is one of the most bizarre downgrades I've ever seen.
Having abandoned wondoze about 20 years ago, I can only laugh at this.
It's obviously (like windoze in general) not for people that have the slightest clue about how a computer works.
Once you have enough s/w on the local device, to boot and connect to the internet, why do you need to load windows at that point?
I cringe daily as I watch the increase in the number of linux developers (both the kernel, and applications) doing their work in WSL.
Just another reason I'm glad I was born before corps worshiping children ruined the internet (NOTE: this is just a joking rhetorical response the the whine of "grown-ups ruined everything")
No wonder the modern generations will never own homes, or have financial security, corps worship is self-sabotage...
I think the insinuation is more that we let boomers shove garbage down our throats (failing to recognize that we're all victims of state-controlled monopolies).
My worry would be ISP's getting their cut, (and Microsoft spying on you 24/7). Comcast: "oh sorry you reached your 1TB limit of bandwidth this month, upgrade to Premium and none of Microsoft's usage counts against your limit (of which they were responsible for 999GB)
Hopefully the final push that I need to give up video games (or at least explore the options around running them on Linux more closely) and move to Linux on the desktop full time rather than just running it in WSL.
I am pleasantly surprised how good combo Debian sid / Steam Beta / Proton Experimental has been for gaming (converted from OS X for different reasons and then discovered the gaming experience is great too)
Valve could have tried to cater to the Android/NDK folks to also support native GNU/Linux, and do some nudging into cross platforms APIs like Apple is doing with the game porting kit, instead they chose to solidify DirectX/Windows as the main APIs PC game developers care about.
This and cloud gaming... it has the obvious real-economic efficiency gains of centralizing hardware (and software) for better overall utilization, easier procurement, development, management and integration albeit all dependent on users' internet connection for actual usage.
The move to cloud infrastructure in the business world sets a precedent. Increasingly I notice self-hosted things being labeled 'legacy' by influencer blogs (even if it makes no fundamental sense infrastructure or software architecture-wise).
Users want things to "just work", no matter the wider implications. Makes me real scared for personal computing :(
Why not just setup a Windows VM and remote into it? I did that with a friend several months ago to play some "local multiplayer" games together remotely, as if we were sitting at the same keyboard.
You laugh, but RDP is actually one of the few things Microsoft does right. It (can) tightly integrate to the window layer, so it's way more responsive and uses less bandwidth. VNC just does screen grabs, and X11+forwarding only works for a few minutes before crashing (that's been my experience).
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadCertainly you can get a used PC for less but most new PCs start at $500 with limited storage. Getting a fully functional PC for $X/month could work for certain values of X.
You would probably need a very good network connection. I don't think this would work for non-stationary laptops.
Latency is a huge killer though, and any small interruption becomes a problem.
But I'm also thinking about stuff like locally connecting a USB hard-drive, you will want to have good speed copying the files to the cloud computer.
I wonder if the video could be accelerated for common sites by playing locally and being overlayed into the remote session.
A good portion of the people I know would not know what a USB stick or hard drive was for or how to use one.
Their phones do upload all of their content to the cloud though. This is only becoming more common.
What they're trying to do is to migrate the OS itself into something that can run on a browser and interact with the windows cloud vía xhr calls. webassembly makes this wholy possible.
this is how office 365 works, it's not windows office software streamed to your computer,it's office ported to the browser and cloud is your storage.
> Build on Windows 365 to enable a full Windows operating system system streamed from the cloud to any device.
I interpreted that as a remote desktop session of some sort, but maybe some day it will look more like you're suggesting. It is the word "full" that sways me this way.
I don't know how I feel about booting an OS (Linux, MacOS, Windows) to open an OS (actually a browser) that runs the OS (Windows Online) though. Every time I say it though, I realize we're already pretty close.
Web app? But if it runs applications, and provides access to and manages resources, at what point is it also considered an OS?
If you prefer to work on Apple hardware and absolutely must use Windows, this currently feels like the best possible arrangement. Your MacBook is the only machine you ever need to touch again.
The privacy stuff doesn't really work on me anymore. Too many security edges and other things I already don't take care of with a physical box. I am not adding much value by keeping this stuff in my house vs in the cloud.
The final nail in my windows machine coffin is the fact that I don't play games anymore. I much prefer portability & assurance over anything else. My house could completely burn down and I could be back online the moment I have a new machine in hand without a single byte of data or user session state being lost.
they created the problem and sold you the solution! brilliant.
I was part of that piracy wave, but now think things should get paid for.
Microsoft has already announced its custom ai chips at ignite this week
Windows App showcases the first step in this strategy.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-app/overview
Keeping my fingers crossed!
They can't even get anywhere near feature parity with the web based office offering. Each of their web-based office apps is almost unusable for me.
If they go 100% on this, I will put money on it being looked upon as one of the worst decisions they've made as a company in 10 years time.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23930478/microsoft-ceo-s...
Since this move would make (advanced) user experience worse, it sounds very realistic to me.
Had they suddenly say "Windows 11 was a big mistake, we are moving back to Windows 7 experience, HTML-based pseudo-UIs are banned" etc. - now that would sound unrealistic.
It's obviously (like windoze in general) not for people that have the slightest clue about how a computer works.
Once you have enough s/w on the local device, to boot and connect to the internet, why do you need to load windows at that point?
I cringe daily as I watch the increase in the number of linux developers (both the kernel, and applications) doing their work in WSL.
Just another reason I'm glad I was born before corps worshiping children ruined the internet (NOTE: this is just a joking rhetorical response the the whine of "grown-ups ruined everything")
No wonder the modern generations will never own homes, or have financial security, corps worship is self-sabotage...
The move to cloud infrastructure in the business world sets a precedent. Increasingly I notice self-hosted things being labeled 'legacy' by influencer blogs (even if it makes no fundamental sense infrastructure or software architecture-wise).
Users want things to "just work", no matter the wider implications. Makes me real scared for personal computing :(
Epic is going to have a seizure.
This is a large part of why my new PC is running PopOS.