This all pre-dates AI. It's response to market forces and revenue growth.

With the rise of Linux and ChromeOS the operating system is becoming a free commodity. Applications with real revenue are becoming web bound, google here as shown the way. Google's productivity software is a major threat to Microsoft. Here there is monthly recurring revenue.

There is no significant profit left in producing the operating systems. It is a necessity, sure, but it's not offering a USP. It just is.

So, the corporate thinking goes, switch investment into monthly paying applications, like Office 365. Reduce the investment in the OS, while using the established user base as a way to push new customers toward the online services Microsoft provides. Sure, MS can extend it to ARM, but this is because they are chasing the Chrome OS users.

Of course, Windows, like MacOS can still host "native" applications like desktop versions of office, or adobe products. But the real revenue is in the online monthly subscriptions. Games will fall into this section too.

In the end to the user, Windows becomes just like Chrome OS, a launch pad into online services.

Valve seeks the direction of travel and creates it's own OS designed to launch games and drive users to its store... it's the same story, and play book.

For developers, and creatives, the only home left is Linux (and maybe *BSD). This is acknowledged, as both Windows and MacOS can now run Linux applications via WSL and Apple Containers. Why? = because this helps developers create applications that can be hosted in the cloud... something that has recurring revenue.

AI? - Well, it's a possible accelerator down this path, as the hardware needed to host the inference is huge.

So what's going to happen in the future? - Well, the cost of AI is a limiting factor. Add in the political moves between China, the US and the EU are going to limit the growth of US owned cloud. Digital sovereignty is key, and the US government can get access to anything held on US owned servers. China is moving forward with plans to remove US technology from its ecosystem.

The result, well, AI does offer great productivity gains with costs so high, and latency of online services, tasks specific small models will be pushed to the desktop. Laptop and hardware manufacturers will add accelerators for this. In the EU there will be new opportunities for competitors to Microsoft / Google to stand up solutions, open source will be key to this, so NextCloud, will be popular. But overall there will be a pull away from the very thin client toward a slightly thicker client. The EU will probably want to sponsor, or help create a version of an AI agent similar to DeepSeek in China, they've shown what's possible with a smaller budget.

This won't run on Windows, or MacOS, it's all going to end up running on Linux. A Linux disto from China, and one for the EU.