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Comment by jfasi | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting. Where are the public-facing Windows machines? I wonder if there's an opportunity in creating "Windows as a Service?" So many of us live on Mac OS or Linux and only need Windows on those rare occasions when someone sends us a .docx file or when we need to access some horrible web application that only works with Java SE 1.6.36_2 running on IE.

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"Windows as a Service" is essentially exactly what this is. Despite the hype I've seen in a few places suggesting this is some radical way to run Windows on Chromebooks what it actually is is a Chromebook-hosted client for VMWare's Horizon "DaaS" (desktop as a service) platform.

    >I wonder if there's an opportunity in creating "Windows as a Service?"

I think Amazon Workspaces is trying to do something similar to that. http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

You can do that with Microsoft's Azure. They support Windows virtual machines.

Since this is an enterprise blog, it appears this is a solution for IT departments where they can host a Windows instance on a VM on their server. The end users can then login via almost dumb terminals.

You can do it with cloud VM's , but the problem is the startup time for a windows VM. The best i know of is ~400 seconds[1].

On the other hand, desktone(acquired by VMware) claims it can boot in 60 seconds[2], which might work for this use case.

[1]http://www.slideshare.net/mingtemp/a-performance-study-on-th... [2]https://twitter.com/Desktone/status/312990615229050880

http://www.browserstack.com, while still fairly specialized, gets you part of the way there.

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