Microsoft enables booting physical PCs directly into cloud PCs Microsoft has delivered a preview of tech that lets a physical PC boot into a virtual one, running in Azure, instead of running Windows from its local drive. "Windows 365 Boot" – as the tech is creatively monikered – is suggested as "a great solution for shared devices, where logging in with a unique user identity can take you …
I've mentioned before I'm a reluctant occasional user of Windows whose PC spends more time in Windows updating Windows than it does running applications. If there was a straightforward way to boot a fully updated Windows on demand, that would be useful to me.
However, I can't see that being technically possible given the way Windows currently works and I can't see it being financially or administratively possible as I can't tick any of "be in the Windows Insider program, have a Windows 11 machine to hand, Microsoft Intune Administrator rights, and a Windows 365 Cloud PC license".
I get the impression that, having basically positioned Windows as a platform for Chrome, the portal to lucrative subscription services online, Microsoft have undermined their own value proposition and are getting a bit panicky.
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"If there was a straightforward way to boot a fully updated Windows on demand, that would be useful to me."
With per minute or per hour pricing? Sign up/set-up fee? Account "maintenance" fee payable every month "including the first 3 hours absolutely 'free'", even if you don't use it, unused minutes can't be rolled over. Special hourly rates if you use more that 23 hours in a single day! Careful what you wish for, they only want your cash, not to make you happy.
Seemingly a thin client which requires a full 'fat' Windows install!
I appreciate this might change in future - proably to a device with a Microsoft 'thin' bootloader nicely locked down in firmware so that, as with phones, it's very difficult to install an alternative OS...
You beat me to it :)
I'm guessing the next "improvement' we'll see is the return of greenscreens (or emulations thereof) to "improve productivity" or similar marketing BS.
I swear, sometimes it feels like Microsoft is mainly busiy proving to management and shareholders that they have such a tight user lock in they can get away with practically anything and yet remain 100% unaccountable for the consequences.
Green screens? Nah, it'll be proper TTY, with green and white paper, so that management has a full log of your day's work.
Next year, Epson & Nvidia will release their full-screen printer with "What the Butler Saw" carousel to get your Doom fps up to an unbelievable 14! Twitch will die, to be replaced by Lulu's FlickNow tech. Speed runs: see level 12 in a pamphlet!
The cold, dead hand of "thin client computing" burst out of its grave. Again.
This time, though, it's tied to "Azure" so you'll be renting your PC from Micros~1.
No doubt there will be a Windows 11 edition that will only use cloud PCs. And they'll pile them high and sell them cheap at your local Electr-o-Mart where average punters can enjoy being ripped off on a monthly basis, forever.
"No doubt there will be a Windows 11 edition that will only use cloud PCs. And they'll pile them high and sell them cheap at your local Electr-o-Mart where average punters can enjoy being ripped off on a monthly basis, forever."
Sadly, that does seem to be the way things are going. It really took off with mobile phones, when the purchase agreement was hidden in the monthly contract payments and customers were offered a "free" upgrade every 2-3 years, ie buying a new phone as we used to call it in the old days. Then "apps" with a monthly fee to keep them working. Even cars seem to be mainly on lease agreements these days. There's a generation or two out there now who don't seem to understand the concept of owning stuff. I dread to think what will happen to them when they retire, own nothing, and can no longer afford all those monthly bills and they really didn't listen to the pension advice they were given on leaving school, ie if you don't put at least 30% away every month, you'll die in poverty, but since they want all the latest shiny and can't even begin to think about saving for a house, will never actually get around to dealing with.
Reading between the lines and thinking about what people are wanting to do, this would seem to be Microsoft’s take on X11 terminals, as the typical desktop (cloud or otherwise) will increasingly have sessions to discrete applications/systems on different clouds, yet need to be treated/integrated as if they were all running locally on the desktop.
Nor has it explained why frontline workers – or anyone else for that matter – should prefer cloud PCs, given that Windows allows creation of multiple user accounts, each with its own level of access to resources. Microsoft has long suggested that arrangement offers all the isolation and security anybody could possibly want.
But Redmond typically gets paid just once when users work on physical PCs. Cloud PC users send cash monthly.
This.
So much it hurts.
But then again I'm sure the marketing people will find other ways to sell it. Just like you might have a situation where there is no net (Yes. I know it makes you anxious, but yes, you know, some times that is what it is and you can't look up the solution to that on "Did your first have a look on our FAQ pages?".)
It also has a lot of appeal internally. There is a lot of CYA in being able to blame all problems on Microsoft.
There was in interesting Hack News thread in which a lot of people said (admitted?) they were cloud advocates because an external supplier would just spin up extra resources, where as internal IT would want a meeting and written justification every time they asked for an extra VPS.
People also seem to be able to accept the unreliability. When a number of people I know were affected by Gmail being down for a day, they were posting to LinkedIn about the positive side of not having email to read for a day.
And also don't forget the internet connection required for those cloud PC connections... Your branch offices all have gigabit internet links, right? RIGHT? /sarcasm
The few places I've worked at that have frontline workers and shared workstations either all used roaming profiles, which loaded your profile in from a (hopefully local to the site) file server to the machine you were using for that shift, OR just had a local profile with the icons for the apps the frontline staff use on the 'public' or 'all users' desktop, so everyone had the same apps on that machine.
But yeah... cloud PCs. let's add points of failure (internet, cloud services, failing to pay the bill for either of the two previous items, etc...) to something that was at one point actually something reliable, because we aren't making enough money from people already...
This is going to SUCK. Instead of buying decent local PCs, MS is going to sell companies who are using Office and Teams (using Teams proves you don't give a crap about anything except that it's 'free') on just having virtual cloud 'PCs' and sh#@$y client PCs instead for everything. Hey, they'll say, you never need to upgrade your hardware or do IT work again.
So I'm going to end up trying to debug deep C++ running through millions of records (or hideous JavaScript, whatever) on a last Gen Intel Celeron that only has a 1920x1080 screen and the absolute minimum specs and is running the real stuff via remote desktop four states away at the speed of our crappy local network and showing on the worst possible display. And I'm not going to have local admin access to install anything required at all. It's going to be corporate hell. I can absolutely see this as the future of office computing, because corporations and MS have been working tirelessly for decades to make it as sh@#$y as possible (hello open offices!).
At the risk of being cynical.... Sounds like job security to me. The more Charlie-Foxtrot's that MSFT rolls out, the more the industry needs to retain people like us to keep it working.
Don't you get it?? The whole tech industry is one giant self-licking ice-cream cone. Just when you get through the soft part and bite the crunchy cone, someone hands you a brand new one to start licking.
Wy-50, Wy-60, IBM 3151, DEC VT-101, LSI ADM 3a, Sherwood 6030, ADDS-4000, Televideo 925, and Data General D100: serial terminals I had which I had to get rid of due to moving to a smaller place. (It wasn't just the terminals, it was the also the largish computers which they connected to.)
I can see a use for this in a business setting - for instance, with a lot of WFH nowadays (myself included), rather than supplying laptops/PCs to employees they could do one of a couple of things.
Allow an employee to use their own PC to connect to a virtual PC on a hosted environment or provide a cheap thin client, like a RPi to connect, this means that companies can reduce phsyical hardware supplied to employees which would make it a lot cheaper.
Saying that, they don't need to run in some cloud providers environment as companies could just host it all themselves in their own environments using things like VMWare Horizon or one of the mass of other products out ther.
it wouldn't surprise me if companies go down that route, I fully expect that the company I work for would do that as literally only use the laptop for teams and outlook and my actual work is done thru hopping onto other secured hosts and from their jumping onwards.
"Allow an employee to use their own PC to connect to a virtual PC on a hosted environment or provide a cheap thin client, like a RPi to connect, this means that companies can reduce phsyical hardware supplied to employees which would make it a lot cheaper."
An additional advantage that I find working remotely is that if I am working with large volumes of data, RDP onto a "client" running in the same datacenter as the database server makes managing data much faster, since otherwise the whole datasets need to be transmitted over the network to my PC instead of just the screen view. Yes, it also means I am limited in what I can do if there are network / VPN issues, but nowadays (at least where I work) these are incredibly rare.
>” An additional advantage … RDP onto a "client" running in the same datacenter as the database server makes managing data much faster”
Agree this in some cases can make sense, remember using this model as It meant we weren’t constrained by the more limited office LAN to remote data centre bandwidth. However, cloud and most certainly the windows 365 service, doesn’t give you these nice colocation performance levels or guarantees that such performance levels are possible; although it might be available at additional cost…
Yes, there is merit in this way of thinking.
The way that one of the remote working facilities I use at the moment works is a Windows laptop with an encrypted VPN to the environment at work, with all the normal network shares hosted at work and local processing on the laptop.
If I have to move a large file from one share to another, it ends up getting dragged down from one remote share, only to be pushed back up to another one. OK, my broadband is not that slow, but still dragging software updates around through it twice is a real waste of time and bandwidth.
I can remote control the PC on my desk at work, provided it's not gone into a unusable state because of updates, or turned itself off, and it's not being used by someone else.
I really miss being able to SSH directly into a remote shared UNIX system, and do everything from there (even with X11). But interacting with a mainly Windows environment, with Windows shares (yes, I do use SAMBA and CIFS support, but recent Windows security updates are making that increasingly more difficult - and I have zero control of the Windows environment) and many windows centric applications make this difficult to impossible.
Many years ago I used to run properly written (none of this pixmap blitting crap) X11 applications through a 28.8Kb/s modem link, and found it not that unpleasant, but things have moved on and got worse.
By "no licensing worries" meaning "we are charging you a simplified amount for use of this service, because even our own licensing experts contracted severe migraines trying to figure out the exact combination of licensing that would be needed to run an RDS farm on-prem." /sarcasm
That makes some pretty big assumptions...
- Employees have a Win11 PC - Win7 & Mac users will now speak up.
- Employees want to share their Win11 PC - Do we need the lecture on keeping work & home PC 'tasks' separate?
- Employees have available bandwidth - Or is the employer going to pay for a Starlink upgrade to replace their DSL?
This whole proposition is trying to re-invent a wheel that already spins. So much of my work is being done through a browser interface today, I can run that on a low-cost PC already.
About 10 years ago I worked in a small financial firm, approx 20 users, and each desk had a Zotac micro-PC (5x5x1.5") running Linux (Ubuntu I think).
On bootup they auto-ran an RDP client where you entered Username, Password and Device ID (your personal remote VM) - ie the boxes themselves weren't personalized in any way.
Five seconds later you're in your own VMware VM.
And of course Citrix have been doing similar for years.
That's not to say it isn't welcome, it is I think, but they're just playing catch-up.
To add...
Being a financial firm the motivation was twofold:
Firstly no data other than on paper was stored locally in the office; and
Secondly all data, personal VM and servers, was serially backed up nightly in a single operation. That is, the possibility to revert to an earlier date.
Though reading/saving to a local USB stick was possible for data transfer of course.
Maybe the Wayland people will finally realise why we like[1] using X11 over the network[2].
Of course, X11 does it better[3]: connect to as many clients on as many remote systems as you want, but only have the one desktop to manage (and that can be local or remote, you get to choose!).
[1] okay, there is room for improvement, but the basics are sound. Yes, even clipboards - basic ones.
[2] over a suitably encrypted link, of course.
[3] them's fighting words: cue being told off 'cos RDP can do that sort of thing nowadays (? it may well do better now than last time we tried it)
"[3] them's fighting words: cue being told off 'cos RDP can do that sort of thing nowadays (? it may well do better now than last time we tried it)"
Yeah, unless RDP has changed since I last used it, the problem with RDP is the D part. I don't want a whole remote desktop appearing on and taking up my whole screen so I can run one app on it. I just want the remote app to appear on my existing desktop :-)
Sounds cool, however in reality:-
1. Offline use?
2. Reliant on consistent and good bandwidth?
3. Reliant on Microsoft tech support and the long wait times when things don't work?
4. Forced continuous updates to everything rather than holding back and taking updates when I want them?
5. Less control of the specification & what is deemed high performance by Microsoft might not be the same as my perspective!
6. Third party software support
Just a few thoughts.
Is that sometimes it doesn't work well.
A good case in point is that in our household we still regularly use DVD's to watch films. Why? Here are just a few examples:
- When we moved in we had a few days without Internet. Plus a child that really enjoys watching a film.
- Streaming services are sometimes down
- Internet connections are sometimes flaky
- Both the 2nd and 3rd together with buffering / latency
- We don't care about "recommendations". We can find something to watch from our library of DVDs without anyone else intervening
- We've already paid for everything required ONCE and ONCE only.
That very short trip over a HDMI cable from the DVD player to the TV seems quite simple...and is very reliable. In much the same way... booting an OS from a local disk just seems quite sensible.
You also forgot....
- Invasion of privacy
I deployed a Pi-Hole. I was absolutely shocked the amount of DNS lookups all the streaming devices are doing when they are NOT being used! Every damn one of those got dropped like day-old sushi, including the so-called "Smart" TV's. Seriously, WTH do I need to agree to a EULA for to simply watch input on HDMI1 (helllllo Samsung!). Every TV used for streaming now has a dedicated PC attached with a browser that I control.
Does it cost me more than the devices that 'monetize the user after the sale'? Yes!
The corollary... It is surprising how cheaply the great unwashed masses will sell their privacy.
old days I see.
Strangely if your company can be bothered they can setup a system as described using VNC(or any other remote desktop system) running own their own servers with their data completely under their own control.
hell, if I can manage to setup a secure VNC setup so I can control my server PC from my phone I'm pretty sure anyone technically qualified can do it for multiple clients
Which begs the question........... why?
And it can only be for 2 reasons.
1. m$ can sell your data(or whatever it can scrape from your data... hi you're browsing for anti-virus software... buy m$ anti-virus )
2. so they can sell the same OS to you every month....... and then the fun begins... because once your data is on their servers..... you'll have to pay EVERY month to access it or Poof its gone and you're not only locked to using windows/office, but also locked to m$ with regard to your data, and its most likely that if you request your data when you terminate the contract, they'll says "computer says no".
Year of desktop linux............ at this rate we'll have no choice
Besides with office 357&5/8's record, do you really want to be in a position of not being able to even boot your pc?
Icon... for the people thinking its a good idea
"Strangely if your company can be bothered they can setup a system as described using VNC(or any other remote desktop system) running own their own servers with their data completely under their own control."
Indeed - terminal servers have been around for many years. Microsoft likes to make things difficult now though, e.g. not supporting the Office 365 apps on Server 2022 for several years until there was sufficient customer pressure that they had to back down, What they wanted of course was to push people to Azure VIrtual Desktop which, coincidentally of course, is a subscription service on Azure. The only way you can run it legally on-prem is using Azure Stack HCI, that wonderful idea which MS have come up with whereby you pay monthly subscription charges to run your own VMs on your own hardware (I'm told by a consultancy who help us with servers that Azure Stack HCI is proving unpopular because it's so expensive).
This will save MS from baking so much spyware into W11. Booted from the MS cloud, MS will have unfettered system-level access to all trade secrets, corporate financials, personal data, email, online conferences, etc. Then, there's always the possibility of a rogue MS employee taking such for personal profit. AND the users get to pay for the privilege of having absolutely all their data hoovered up -- whenever Office 3xx is operational, that is.
Bias disclosure: Ubuntu and Libre Office user here.
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