Windows 365 Link: The New Device That Imprisons Users in Microsofts Cloud
cheapskatesguide.org
cheapskatesguide.org
They have existed in the past. They will exist in the future. The fact that it's locked to one particular server is irrelevant. If you don't want to use that service - don't buy it!
IT administrators will have plenty of control over this, and the software it runs, and the configuration of it
I'm not sure the author has ever worked in or has any knowledge of corporate IT departments, their priorities, or how any of it works
Conceptually, it’s somewhat not entirely unlike those weird printers that require a subscription to work. No clue who in their sane mind would buy something like that, but turns out some people actually do.
I didn't get the impression that this was meant for home, or even most office use. I don't think it would make sense in either setting because each would have more complex user requirements and weird edge cases. Maybe the author is right in the long run? I'm sure MS would love mote control and a monthly subscription fee from every customer...I just don't see MS being nearly so candid, as they are in this video. I'd expect way more cheesy stock footage, mixed in with ominous warnings about "darkweb" and ransomware. The video in question was more like "This makes your job easier" not a "This makes your life better". Heck, they didn't even mention some cheesy AI-gimmick tie-in.
I am a developer and I was using AWS Cloud 9 exclusively for a year until it was deprecated because it was much faster working with a lot of data in a VM hosted on AWS than it was on my local PC even though I did have 1GB symmetrical Fiber at home.
It was definitely a better experience working with a cloud IDE when traveling for business with much slower internet.
This is functionally no different than Chromebooks and Google ”imprisoning” hundreds of school districts.
Besides, “the enterprise” has been “imprisoned” by Microsoft for decades. They were never going to switch over to Linux or anything else en masse.
Even companies that did have Macs were still buying Microsoft Office since before Office was even available for Windows.
Also, IT departments love locked down computers and I’ve seen plenty of places that use Citrix with terminals.
> This is functionally no different than Chromebooks and Google ”imprisoning” hundreds of school districts.
Chromebooks make it trivial to switch to developer mode and get root, and then even disable write protection and flash arbitrary firmware. Can you do that with these boxes?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/link
> Windows 365 Link is for organizations that have desk-based workers and are using, or are considering using, Windows 365. Windows 365 Link is well suited for enabling secure productivity in shared workspaces such as hot desks, call centers, reception desks, labs, and more.
And on top of that it’s a desktop computer. There are plenty of mini PC’s for about the same price that are more powerful and not locked down.
Going by Microsoft’s previous hardware and OS support, you should expect the hardware to be officially supported for over a decade.
The computers that were sold on eBay, couldn’t run the software the school/business needed. As long as these can connect to the cloud, that won’t be an issue
I doubt very many enterprise level IT departments are running any kind of thin client infra such as Citrix or Horizon or anything else (like, god forbid, Oracle) without maintenance agreements in place on both the software and the hardware side of things so just moving everything left and renting the whole stack instead of having half of it capex and half of it opex isn't that big of a shift in how these things are paid for
Yes, we get it, it's proprietary, anything else to say?
I'm pretty sure this is just part of a service.
For enterprise IT, it's got some potential. Devices users can't muck with facilitate standard operating environments, hot desks, and similar practices that are already user hostile. In that setting, there's no big deal here. It's even got the chance to be less awfully intrusive than existing SOE software.
It's also, IMO, a bit of a leveraging of a monopoly position to crowd out those SOE vendors. Microsoft's the only one who can make this device; anyone else is stuck at best making a browser-only thin client and hoping 365 works well on it for long enough to recoup R&D costs and make bank on top. Not a fan of SOE vendors, but not a fan of monopoly control either.
Microsoft knows that no other vendor in the race to the bottom commodity market that is the PC space is going to make anything of any quality.
It’s the same motivation that Google has for the Pixel. Google knows that the Pixel is not going to take the world by storm.
I certainly miss the feeling that home computers were going to be empowering--not merely situationally useful--to individuals. Affordable capital equipment, not just a service for hire.
The next greedy iteration, slowed by the US' lingering anti-trust laws, will probably involve limits on installed software, and websites that might somehow compete with anything offered by Omni Consumer Products.
Do you really think that even in the next 20 years that no one will sell a regular computer? We’ve had lockdowned single purpose computers since the coders consoles came out in 1977.
True this has more local processing power than dumb terminals in the past. But only because the cost of compute has gotten a lot cheaper and things that people want today - multiple monitors, good video conferencing (that works locally on these devices) require low latency.
This is no different than the needless panic when Apple introduced the Mac App Store in 2006 and people thought Apple would lock out installing apps outside of the App Store on Macs.
For context
For 30 you get 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM,64 GB Storage. For 300 you get 16 vCPU,64 GB RAM, 1 TB Storage.
https://www.microsoft.com/en/windows-365/enterprise/all-pric...