Middle term? The phasing out of personal computers, and moving toward a system of servers/terminals where noone owns software.
You’ll rent computing power or storage space, you’ll only pay for the interface.I personally don’t see the “Eureka!” moment that big tech apparently does in moving EVERYTHING to the cloud when they struggle to design safe and reliable services as is. The whole cloud stuff just kind of says “sure it will be a privacy nightmare rife for exploitation from bad actors, but THINK of the money we could earn from it in the long run!”
That’s basically it. They keep control. They can charge subscriptions. They own it. Not you.
Corporations will literally do anything except act remotely ethically towards consumers.
Considering how stadia panned out, this is a nothing burger for at least the next decade.
With the state of internet speeds in the US? No. This won’t work.
Bingo! Rural in particular is slow and unreliable. Something like this isn’t a practical option even if I was OK with it. I’m already planning to switch to Linux when I get a new PC or when Windows 10 hits EoL. This would make the switch a necessity.
My take on this Cloud-First-Windows vision that was leaked from a Microsoft presentation with very little details and just a lot of speculation:
If it actually happens, it will be more similar to a Chromebook, they will provide, likely an ARM based, low specs device with a basic Windows install that perhaps only has the cloud-connector (probably RDP based), One Drive to sync files, and Edge with extensions to run Office365 in offline mode.
Apps would just be either web-wrapper based apps, or RDP Apps, or you could just deploy your cloud desktop to do some work that requires more power.
I also think they would still provide an x86_64 based Windows for more powerful PCs for content creators and gamers.
In the very late 90s or early 2000s there was a leaked “October papers” or something like that. It detailed Microsoft’s plan to move to Windows as a service. It seems like it is taking longer than they thought, but they’ve been moving this way for a long time.
I wish I kept a copy or was better at searching the old internet…
yeah it would be something like this, a probably windows 365 will work as the google one
I’m not entirely a fan the idea of having my OS run somewhere other than my own computer, unless it’s like a remote lab I use for specific tasks. Like if I could use Linux, and just use this for my classes that run Windows exclusive software, then I’d maybe use it. Otherwise I think it’s a bit weird to have your whole computer basically be in the cloud.
Yeah, good luck preventing forced “upgrades/updates” every time a new Windows OS comes out too. No thanks, I’ll take my software locally thank you haha.
It means I’ll continue to happily use Linux.
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Lol likewise!
I used to use OneDrive but they recently shrunk down everyone’s free storage capacity to laughably small space and now wish for everyone to subscribe to more paid space.
🖕🏼bye bye OneDrive.
I’m out of the loop on this subject. I know Onedrive previously offered 15GB to free users, then strunk it to 5GB, but kept the larger amount to legacy users.
Have they made another reduction recently?
Yeah, fuck one drive! Microsoft can eat my entire ass.
Haha, I second that
That’s cute. But there is software that only runs on Windows. And some people have to use it.
winehq.org runs most everything now. What can’t you get to run?
even proprietary softwares? Not that I like to run them, but some uni workstations have them and sometimes they’re unescapable :(
Long term, there is some benefit to this sort of concept. You aren’t going to have as much freedom to turn your cloud based OS into a custom build, but what you will have is a machine which will never have down time for patches and security updates. The user will be running their app remotely, using all the power and hardware of a data center, and the instance of the app can migrate from one host PC to another, seamlessly without any perception to the end user. Furthermore a user can access all their applications and data from whatever client they are using and it will migrate this session from their terminal, to their phone, to their AR HMDs.
It isn’t going to be a change which happens over night, and it will be more like how car engine have become less user serviceable but more reliable and efficient. It will be a different experience for sure, but it has potential value beyond being a way to charge people subscriptions.
Ehhh we’ve been down that road before with thin clients. Anyone who has had to do their job on thin clients will tell you the experience never compares to running it locally
We have, and there are still things to solve before this is completely practical. This is still different than connecting to a mainframe over a 3270 terminal. A closer example of how this would work is port forwarding an X11 to a remote system or using SSH to tunnel to a server where I’ve ran screen. If I’ve connected to a GUI application running on a server or reconnected my SSH session, it is less important about where I’m connecting from. Extending this concept to Windows, you wouldn’t even need local storage for most needs. It won’t be practical for places with poor network connectivity, but where it is reliable, high bandwidth, and low latency, it won’t be so discernable from local use for most business applications. This is probably the biggest driving force behind XCloud. If Microsoft can make games run across networks with minimal problems, business applications are going to do just fine. XCloud works great for me, allowing me to stream with few problems. That’s less true for others in my family, so clearly this isn’t something which can roll out to everyone, everywhere, all at once. I think it would be great to be able to spin up additional vCPU cores or grow drive space or system RAM as needed per process so that I’m not wasting cycles or underutilizing my hardware. It seems like this would become possible with this sort of platform.
a user can access all their applications and data from whatever client they are using
Also, users won’t own their most basic data anymore, nor will they be able to control how it is used. Canceling a subscription (or being locked out) could mean loosing it all.
For a business, I see this as a strong benefit for this design. The work done for a company is the property of that company by most hiring contracts, so the work done on a remote system can by tightly controlled. At the same time, it would allow someone to use their own thin client to do both professional and personal work and keep things isolated. For someone doing freelance work, it makes sharing a natural extension of that process and access can be granted or revoked as it relates to contracts. That seems like an advantage to corporate IT departments.
As for individuals, I don’t see how this takes away ownership. Regulations will be updated to allow users to request their data in compliance with GDPR requests, so nothing would become completely locked up. Should that be challenged ever, I don’t think any jurisdiction would say that Microsoft owns the data. What a user will be able to do with the bits they receive is a different question.
I understand your point (regarding protection of intellectual property and having a homogeneous and controlled IT infrastructure), but I’d like to add that as a business (disregarding what my employees might like or consider more effective) I am still not in control of anything if my data and applications are somewhere “in the cloud” and I have no control over it. As a company I would be bound to that provider (in this case Microsoft) and would have to pay whatever they require for whatever they offer(good or bad services). A small alleviation would be to have that “cloud” on premise, but I think that that’s highly unrealistic. In this regard, a business is very similar to the plain user in my previous reply.
Also, don’t forget that GDPR doesn’t apply everywhere. That’s just a EU requirement which might or might not be fully implemented, even when required. As I mentioned, there’s no guarantee that your company data is not misused when it’s completely out of your hands. Not even to think about what a security breach or outage would mean and what kind of impact it would have.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to spread FUD, but I am general skeptical and trying to think critically. Moving “everything” in “the cloud”, in the hands of one single actor requires a level of trust which I’m not able to provide and introduces single points of failure which I wouldn’t like to have, neither as individual nor as company.
Thanks for reading my longest post ever. ;-)
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It means Windows is switching to a subscription model. It could be a good thing for some Linux users, if they need Windows for specific applications and don’t want to spin up a VM. O can’t see a reason for using it beyond that, other than being forced to, because Microsoft kills off yoir local Windows and turns your computer for a bootloader for a cloud system, which is itself a bootloader for your browser, for most people. What a terrible world we live in. Zero privacy guaranteed, a subscription model making Windows more profitable (again).
ALSO, good luck stripping down Windows, removing bloatware, ads and telemetry. I GUARANTEE you it will be impossible to remove ads and telemetry on Windows in the Cloud. And thus that crap will be FORCED on you!
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Double comment.
My bad, the app had an issue.
Precisely. Putting more of the control onto Microsoft server means this: you do anything that they don’t like? No Windows for you. Oh, now we need more money so now we’re putting in a shitty change, don’t like it? Suck it up.
User choice harms companies
However, since most retail hardware is built to target Windows compatibility, it could mean fewer options for hardware that will be easy to install Linux (or any other OS) on.
In fact, I would count on Microsift making their hardware spec intentionally be difficult to load anything “unapproved” on.
they are doing that already with secureboot.
altho i fortunatley haven’t encountered machines yet where you can’t disable it.
Never underestimate greed is something I learned in my 46 years alive.
“You will own nothing and be happy”
It does not mean anything for me because I am not a Windows user. For Windows users it means subscription models and renting software. It could also mean eventually booting your computer into a desktop that is in the cloud. I hope to god that does not happen because it may make finding hardware that will run Linux and BSD that much harder.
I don’t think it’s possible for them to do so, because that would means killing the gaming aspect of Windows. GPU on cloud is stupidly overpriced and expensive, just look at Standard_NV6 for an example, it easily cost $10,000/yr according to this (Just look for anything that have “N” in it’s name for GPU enabled VM and they are all expensive.)
If they try to ban everyone from being allowed to use their own computer hardware, I really doubt people would stay on Windows, they most likely would be in the 5 stages of griefs and then contemplate on switching to either Linux or Mac OSX.
A point where could be good, is being able to work from home more easily, I mean I’ve applied to some companies where I could only work using their computers, so If I can work from home with this. But I don’t really understand why they need it
If it wasn’t clear from the article, that’s already a thing. They can even set up your software for you. I can see how it would make managing hardware in lots of different places a lot easier.
I really don’t see any benefit to it (for users) for home use. It’s certainly an easy way to make Windows a subscription service and charge you for storage. It also pretty much wipes out any data privacy on your devices.
More fees.
