Microsoft thinks cloud PCs might be overkill, starts streaming just apps under Windows 365 Microsoft thinks cloudy PCs might be overkill for some users, so has started streaming individual apps instead as part of its Windows 365 service. The software giant on Thursday announced the public preview of what it calls “Windows 365 Cloud Apps”, a service that allows users of Frontline Cloud PCs – a virtual PC shared by a …
• Microsoft: promoting the average person's view that "computing is just stuff you can do with MS apps." If the SaaS breaks, those users are rendered helpless.
• Omnissa: ... Omnissa’s belief that users are tired of using multiple tools to manage their fleets of physical and virtual endpoints.
This "belief", if it is a true belief and not just marketing bulkshit, was formed by marketers talking with customers' managers -- said managers having little-to-no knowledge of what techies do, use, and want.
A single, do-every-conceivable-thing mega-program would be a nightmare to navigate, and due to its sheer size, likely to contain many bugs.
Carpenters, machinists, mechanics, installers, electronics techs, and blacksmiths all have their own custom-selected tool sets and their own little collection of custom-made jigs, shims, and gizmos to help them do their jobs more-efficiently.
The same is true for (good) sysadmins, though their "tools, shims, and jigs" are programs and scripts.
If you want your (corporate) users to run a single "app", then it's already in the browser.
Much as I find it shameful, literally everything Microsoft are offering in this is already available as an in-browser "web app". Most are now natively web apps, requiring Electron (or Edge Electron) to run locally anyway.
The other thing is that exactly zero corporate drones require one app. They all need at least three - Instant Messaging, Email, and Task.
Rob Easterway's 2019 talk to the Royal Institution indicates that many (most?) spreadsheets are wrong (YouTube). I, certainly, have come across a number - Perhaps caused by the "evolution" of Excel, its resultant complexity, lack of suitable training, and the attitude of some of its users?
Over the last couple of years, I have prototyped mine with Apple Notes (Apple computer and iPad). For me, it is generally less complex (prettier?) and faster to produce what I need. Conversion to Excel is normally straightforward, with few incompatibilities - typically colours of conditional formatting, and the order of firing of rules. A potential problem is no field locking, but individual tables can be locked.
Well, I guess the market will decide. This is a fairly simple thing to offer given WVD already exists. I can imagine a few scenarios where a LoB app needs to be accessible to users (e.g. a PoS system or similar) and pushing that as a virtual app that is centrally managed seems quite a sensible idea. For a kiosk PC this would allow multiple users to log on to app only rather than the kiosk OS itself.
I agree with the general sentiment, however if we are talking about office workers then the only reason they have Microsoft Office in the first place is because LibreOffice isn't able to reproduce all of the rendering bugs required to correctly handle word documents. Word for web is even less compatible!
I had some "job seeker specialist" reformat my CV a while back, she sent a word document. I could open it in the desktop version of word, but as I didn't have a license it was read-only. I tried using the free web version of word to edit it, but the formatting was completely screwed up. Using the web version to export to PDF rendered correctly, but obviously I couldn't actually edit the document without also breaking that.
My CV is now an easy to update "HTML document", wrapped in a HTML-to-PDF script. This is a solution where readers of this site are more likely to consider it "easy to update" than your typical office worker.
Funny how all the “cloud-first” vendors dress this up as modernisation, when the deal-breaker for most actual workers hasn’t changed in decades: latency. You can “get used to it” only in the same way you can “get used to” a blunt scalpel or a spanner from Poundland - by lowering your expectations and hoping the tool doesn’t matter.
For knowledge workers, especially those with neurodivergence, every micro-delay multiplies into executive-function overload. It’s not just inconvenient; it’s disabling. Yet Microsoft, AWS, Citrix, Omnissa and the rest parade these cloudy PCs and “streamed apps” as if nobody will dare invoke the Equality Act.
It’s enshittification in its purest form: corporations shaving costs by serving you less, slower, and further away - while charging more for the privilege. If an employer handed mechanics plastic toy tools, they’d riot.
You couldn't already do this with their cloud offering? It's built in to the Microsoft RDP implementation!
On windows 2000 this was the main feature that made Citrix a useful addon to a terminal server. I believe it was 2003 where "seamless app" support was added to the built in terminal server (I suspect this is why it was also renamed to remote desktop services to reflect this?).
I recall using the "alternate shell" option in a saved rdp file on the client to achieve this effect for a desktop version of windows several windows versions ago, however I just tested against a windows 11 machine and this doesn't seem to work any more. They probably deliberately blocked it to force a purchase of windows server? If I recall when I tested their cloudy windows desktops they seemed to be a custom build, so for Microsoft this is a compile-time flag to enable?
Yeah, but it was more of a PaaS offering done using Azure Virtual Desktop. You had to define the performance, enable auto-scaling, architectural choices etc.
This offering is the SaaS version - fully managed by MS. They offer full client desktops using this method but until now App only streaming wasn't a feature.
Wouldn’t this basically be the MS365 version of ChromeOS?
My employer provides me with a somewhat baddass laptop (nice CPU, lots of RAM, a discrete GPU and a 4K screen), then cripples it with a bastard of a corporate Windows image, end point security up the wazoo, and the prevention of any local install - even of browser extensions.
Frankly, I’m bored of lugging it around. This offering sounds perfect.
All things considered, this is simply a natural progression path for O365. If you're already a user, or are a prospective user, this could easily be seen as a decent upgrade as would allow feature and interface parity between Office applications in local install vs. the somewhat clunkier web version. Extra latency aside, of course. That drawback and various others are addressed in thread already...
But, the real drawback is how Microsoft is so, so hungry for your subscription money (and EVERY LAST BIT of your personal and organizational data) and is willing to do all kinds of things to gently guide users (read: effectively force the issue by making it is entirely too much effort for most to avoid) into giving these up.
Just watch the progression on how hard it is to avoid having OneDrive, Copilot, Recall, etc. installed and active as deeper application integration is achieved when many users and orgs { already || should } consider them a hazard for one reason or another. How far will they ramp up the underhanded activities, advertising, and other gentle nudges to get Windows users deeper into the ecosystem? Given history, as far as they're allowed, always playing games with (or simply ignoring or bribing their way past) the legal limits.
Sage will be loving this.
Sage drive is the bain of my existence and now I can hand it all.over to MS with 365 remoteapp and just double the bill to the customer and be done with the local instance and chatge them more for support and the service than ever before as its "properly" in the cloud.
I will advice them its still crap amd should stop using it but until then this the best option.
