Microsoft Wants to Bring Windows 365 Cloud PCs to Consumers

For enterprises it should be obvious: the company has much fuller control and management of all the VM images. It's easier to "reset" machines without needing users to bring physical hardware to an IT person when the "machines" themselves that are running most of the applications are "just" VMs in a cloud.

The consumer question is certainly more interesting and harder. Consumers often have some of the same "management" concerns but fewer ways to address them. How many people do you know need a "smart neighborhood friend" or a "tech savvy grandkid" to sometimes fix their systems or reset things they accidentally "broke"? I can see Microsoft saying "let us make it so your smart or tech savvy friend/relative can live anywhere" and getting at least some interest. Maybe even Microsoft has some ability to more directly say "let us be your smart/tech savvy friend" in some cases, that would get some interest too. That said, even if the interest is there to market to, I'm not sure Microsoft is actually capable of marketing it or getting a lot of buy-in, but I'm very curious to see what they are planning.

Also, I think that Microsoft is counting on the advantage that they can blur the lines between "local operating system" and "streaming from the Cloud" in ways that consumers might not even notice. For Power Users they've already started blending those lines: cloud machines can appear as alternate desktops in the existing Task View. (The ease of switching desktops on Linux, only now some of those desktops might be entire remote machines.) There are also enterprise app tools in Windows that let applications running on a remote machine appear in your taskbar like it was running locally and mostly interactable like any other local window.

I imagine consumer offerings would include a lot more blurred lines.