Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud

While unsophisticated users wont see a difference, and may benefit from having documents and photos in a well managed cloud, nothing lasts forever. I like my personal computer data staying at home. The companies do not respect privacy as a value. Back to timeshared per-minute computing for beancouter reasons I guess. Our small business clients are having to face buying a new server again on a 5 year cycle or moving their business to the cloud out of their direct control but opex is appealing over capex. Microsoft has been a stable cloud partner for office365, and the various software vendors are seeing dollar signs. Intuit has stopped selling a desktop quickbooks. The only disaster is if something happens to this cloud data. We can only hope they don't continue to cut costs on maintenance, but have no way to verify this. I'll keep my PC running on linux I guess. Microsoft doesn't intend to sell a desktop operating system. Will it be the year of the linux desktop by default, in the end?

This is stupid. Who on earth would want to pay a subscription for a PC when they still need to buy one to stream the OS?

I see the value proposition, but it’s only as fast (and expensive) as your internet speed.

- Businesses and consumers could buy less expensive hardware, and simply pay $x/month for access.

- IT could remotely troubleshoot - Fewer hardware issues

- A $10/month subscription would last longer than a $1200 laptop for most consumers.

- MS handles all software updates, stores all your personal data, has complete control of hardware and software.

- Some sort of device is still required, how does it respond to input from a keyboard, mouse, controller, etc? How do USBs, Raspberry Pi’s, External storage devices work?

- You still need a screen. I could see this being an app on smart TVs and mobile devices. (The form-factor of a powerful PC is smaller because of the streaming aspect)

- Internet is still relatively slow, every input would feel laggy and unresponsive.

- Anyone can guess your username/pwd and gain access to your PC.

- Hackers now have a single target.

- If Microsoft’s servers ever go down, you can’t use your PC at all.

- You are subject to any future government regulations with no choice to opt out.

- You lose access to everything if your subscription expires.

- MS has an unprecedented level of access to data that will inevitably be used for advertising.

- MS becomes your ISP and can filter traffic however they want.

What is old is new again. We started off with mainframes, moved to PCs, and now all autonomy will be yanked back from us.

I feel that these Office365 pushes for 'save file' to onedrive are just halfway steps to get people confortable with the idea of cloud based persistence.

It's pretty clear that the revenue for Microsoft will be coming from Cloud + ads. Accelerating that makes total business sense.

Computing as a service rather than a personally owned device. I wonder if at some point they will just lend the hardware as an access point to complete the vision of a no longer personally owned device/software.

Another reason why the whole development story for Windows desktop currently sucks.