Microsoft wants to move Windows to the cloud | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft wants to move Windows to the cloud

theverge.com

36 pointspjmlp52 comments

After Nadella saying he regretted cancelling the windows phone [1], this would seem to be double downing on stupidity.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23930478/microsoft-ceo-s...

Does Nadella aspire to be the Alphabet CEO? Doesn't he know that the cracks are already forming in that goldmine strategy?

I don't know...

Since this move would make (advanced) user experience worse, it sounds very realistic to me.

Had they suddenly say "Windows 11 was a big mistake, we are moving back to Windows 7 experience, HTML-based pseudo-UIs are banned" etc. - now that would sound unrealistic.

Microsoft has been increasingly moving to the cloud. The last update of Outlook changed it from a local application, to one that is through the edge browser. Absolutely awful. Eventually, I had to edit the registry to prevent it from force updating to the web browser option.

The Mac version of this, if you switch to the "new Outlook" looses the ability to connect to an Exchange server, which is one of the most bizarre downgrades I've ever seen.

I only use Windows at work, and only because I'm required to -- but maybe if it becomes cloud-only, my employer will let us start using Linux instead.

Keeping my fingers crossed!

I wouldn't put it past those slimeballs to release "Microsoft Linux" that has all the FOSS command line tools but still runs in the cloud and/or relies on the insecure windows codebase.

Not surprising, there is a decent value proposition in buying a thin client and leasing online compute.

Certainly you can get a used PC for less but most new PCs start at $500 with limited storage. Getting a fully functional PC for $X/month could work for certain values of X.

One of the biggest value proposition would be that Microsoft will take care of keeping it working and backing up your data. That's a huge sell if they can make it work.

You would probably need a very good network connection. I don't think this would work for non-stationary laptops.

A remote desktop session takes a surprisingly small amount of bandwidth until you're running at ridiculous resolutions or trying to watch videos.

Latency is a huge killer though, and any small interruption becomes a problem.

Well, YouTube watching is a thing.

But I'm also thinking about stuff like locally connecting a USB hard-drive, you will want to have good speed copying the files to the cloud computer.

Absolutely. It won’t work for everybody.

I wonder if the video could be accelerated for common sites by playing locally and being overlayed into the remote session.

A good portion of the people I know would not know what a USB stick or hard drive was for or how to use one.

Their phones do upload all of their content to the cloud though. This is only becoming more common.

We are already not allowed to use external drives at my employer, I imagine a similar rule exists at a lot of other large companies

I don't think the idea is to stream a windows session ala vnc, rdp, citrix, etc.

What they're trying to do is to migrate the OS itself into something that can run on a browser and interact with the windows cloud vía xhr calls. webassembly makes this wholy possible.

this is how office 365 works, it's not windows office software streamed to your computer,it's office ported to the browser and cloud is your storage.

From the slide

> Build on Windows 365 to enable a full Windows operating system system streamed from the cloud to any device.

I interpreted that as a remote desktop session of some sort, but maybe some day it will look more like you're suggesting. It is the word "full" that sways me this way.

I don't know how I feel about booting an OS (Linux, MacOS, Windows) to open an OS (actually a browser) that runs the OS (Windows Online) though. Every time I say it though, I realize we're already pretty close.

The Year of the (Thin) Linux Desktop

At that point, is it even considered an OS, or a web app?

With a browser doing everything it can (abstracting graphics acceleration, USB access, etc) the lines get more blurry every day.

Web app? But if it runs applications, and provides access to and manages resources, at what point is it also considered an OS?

I just bought a hybrid smart-tv computer monitor and it has some form of office on it. I haven't logged in to use it, but I'm sure it's just a web browser that renders content from Azure. I don't want them to succeed, but it might actually work for many customers that just use social media and web. They're just re-inventing "mobile apps" for the desktop.

This also means you will have to buy software to install on your cloud os via M$. And folks are upset about googles/apples store cut percentage…

Epic is going to have a seizure.

Microsoft is trying to get Windows users to rent their own computer back from Microsoft.

This is a large part of why my new PC is running PopOS.

This and cloud gaming... it has the obvious real-economic efficiency gains of centralizing hardware (and software) for better overall utilization, easier procurement, development, management and integration albeit all dependent on users' internet connection for actual usage.

The move to cloud infrastructure in the business world sets a precedent. Increasingly I notice self-hosted things being labeled 'legacy' by influencer blogs (even if it makes no fundamental sense infrastructure or software architecture-wise).

Users want things to "just work", no matter the wider implications. Makes me real scared for personal computing :(

Hopefully the final push that I need to give up video games (or at least explore the options around running them on Linux more closely) and move to Linux on the desktop full time rather than just running it in WSL.

I am pleasantly surprised how good combo Debian sid / Steam Beta / Proton Experimental has been for gaming (converted from OS X for different reasons and then discovered the gaming experience is great too)

I am in the process to convert from windows to macOS. Could you tell me a few reasons not to do it before I maybe make a mistake?

Valve could have tried to cater to the Android/NDK folks to also support native GNU/Linux, and do some nudging into cross platforms APIs like Apple is doing with the game porting kit, instead they chose to solidify DirectX/Windows as the main APIs PC game developers care about.

This is honestly horrific.

They can't even get anywhere near feature parity with the web based office offering. Each of their web-based office apps is almost unusable for me.

If they go 100% on this, I will put money on it being looked upon as one of the worst decisions they've made as a company in 10 years time.

Yikes. So they're aiming for the chafing experience of working remote, but like, also when you're not remote.

article from June.

Microsoft has already announced its custom ai chips at ignite this week

Windows App showcases the first step in this strategy.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-app/overview

Oops I missed the date, saw it on twitter feed and though it was from today.

Why not just setup a Windows VM and remote into it? I did that with a friend several months ago to play some "local multiplayer" games together remotely, as if we were sitting at the same keyboard.

90%+ of users don't know what a VM is and probably aren't even interested.

Having abandoned wondoze about 20 years ago, I can only laugh at this.

It's obviously (like windoze in general) not for people that have the slightest clue about how a computer works.

Once you have enough s/w on the local device, to boot and connect to the internet, why do you need to load windows at that point?

I cringe daily as I watch the increase in the number of linux developers (both the kernel, and applications) doing their work in WSL.

Just another reason I'm glad I was born before corps worshiping children ruined the internet (NOTE: this is just a joking rhetorical response the the whine of "grown-ups ruined everything")

No wonder the modern generations will never own homes, or have financial security, corps worship is self-sabotage...

So modern generations will never own homes because they use Windows instead of Linux? That's certainly an interesting take

I think the insinuation is more that we let boomers shove garbage down our throats (failing to recognize that we're all victims of state-controlled monopolies).

This might work for some people, until Microsoft expands what you can't do with it, and/or introduces deliberate incompatibilities.

My worry would be ISP's getting their cut, (and Microsoft spying on you 24/7). Comcast: "oh sorry you reached your 1TB limit of bandwidth this month, upgrade to Premium and none of Microsoft's usage counts against your limit (of which they were responsible for 999GB)

I will absolutely stop using windows if they force remote login. I will do whatever it takes.

How is this different from the old terminal mainframe model?

yeah... uh... they'll probably get some dumb IT to buy in.

how are you supposed to run audio applications @ low latency when the OS is on the cloud!!?

ughhhhhhhh

LOL, behold the MS-branded VNC!

You laugh, but RDP is actually one of the few things Microsoft does right. It (can) tightly integrate to the window layer, so it's way more responsive and uses less bandwidth. VNC just does screen grabs, and X11+forwarding only works for a few minutes before crashing (that's been my experience).

This has been the goal for every software company for awhile now and is the direct result of rampant piracy in the 90s and early 2000s.

No, it's a result of them wanting a steady revenue stream. Why sell software when you can rent it out?

You think they will allow sub lets?

It's both. I was part of many conversations starting around ~2005 or so where business owners wanted to convert to a subscription model to prevent piracy. You see it everywhere now.

Surely it's that they would rather have steady income by the month rather than an unpredictable glut that follows the release?

I was part of that piracy wave, but now think things should get paid for.

W365 enterprise is really nice. I actually provisioned one in a personal tenant for myself recently. For me, $80/m to not have to think about a physical windows box ever again is a pretty easy sale.

If you prefer to work on Apple hardware and absolutely must use Windows, this currently feels like the best possible arrangement. Your MacBook is the only machine you ever need to touch again.

The privacy stuff doesn't really work on me anymore. Too many security edges and other things I already don't take care of with a physical box. I am not adding much value by keeping this stuff in my house vs in the cloud.

The final nail in my windows machine coffin is the fact that I don't play games anymore. I much prefer portability & assurance over anything else. My house could completely burn down and I could be back online the moment I have a new machine in hand without a single byte of data or user session state being lost.

Watching hackers turn into users certainly is a discouraging sight in here.

> $80/m to not have to think about a physical windows box ever again

they created the problem and sold you the solution! brilliant.

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