Recently Microsoft released the link 365 which is basically a thin client for Azure. You can’t run anything locally nor is there any local files. It literally just connects you to a desktop elsewhere.
Do you think this is what Windows 12 might look like? I feel like this idea is not practical for average consumers. Maybe they will make something that’s like Chrome OS?
Was it the future of Windows when they did this the last bunch of times? The Wyse Winterm came out in 1993. It was a huge failure then and every iteration of the same same thing since has also failed.
What makes this version different? Branding? The fact that some of the OS/software doesn’t boot over the network? That you have to have a working Internet connection and not just a working local network and boot server (LOL)?
No business wants this. No consumer wants this. There is no “added value” in this device. It literally only runs software made by Microsoft and even then, only software that runs through Azure.
What office worker literally only needs Office 365? I mean, you can get away with a whole lot just in the browser but if you’re going to do that why bother with this device? Just use ChromeOS stuff (and never be locked in to Microsoft’s stuff).
Why do you say that no business wants this? Obviously, thin clients have been a thing for decades now. This is just another thin client, nothing more.
Thin clients have been failing to sell and being cursed by entire verticals, from individual contributors to top management any time they find an exception for that failure since the 1990s.
No thin client ever saw repeat customers since dump terminals went away. But yeah, if your point is that they exist and have curstomers, that’s true.
I manage a fleet of thin clients for our organization. We have been buying and managing them for 10+ years. They are a huge cost savings over desktops for shared environments (I work for a company in the manufacturing space). For users that do nothing other than log in and check their email and update a spreadsheet, being able to shove 10+ user sessions on a single VM is much more cost effective than deploying and managing a full desktop.
Plus, these devices can connect to Cloud PC’s, so users who need a dedicated machine can use these too. I have been using a Cloud PC for over two years now for all of my job functions and love it. I would happily take one of these devices, as all of my company issued devices are just used to connect to my Cloud PC.
What makes this different is the availability of bandwidth. Back in 1993 we didn’t have 20 megabit connections available pretty much everywhere. Without that running a thin client was going to be painful.
Businesses will like this because they pay less for hardware and can scale up and down a lot faster. No more will there be rooms full of defunct machines, long periods of time between upgrades. They can scale personal machines on the fly and will have much lower electricity costs.
I’ve been using a cloud gaming platform for a few years now and it’s really nice that upgrading my graphics card is just like resizing an EC2 instance. You need a solid internet connection and low latency to the datacenter but it works really well. It’s great being able to play games with full graphics on my laptop without burning my nuts.
However, you’re right that this can all happen in a web browser. But that’s an advantage for Microsoft, because they can sell the service to people on their existing hardware, lowering barrier to entry.
These boxes will be sold as loss leaders and practically given away. Which will be great because I’m sure they’re powerful enough to run pihole and maybe a few services.
