It had to happen: Microsoft's cloudy Windows 365 desktops are due to land next month Microsoft today introduced Windows 365 at its Inspire event: a desktop-as-a-service set for general availability on 2 August. Windows 365, also known as Cloud PC (and previously code-named Deschutes) is a Windows 10 or (when available) Windows 11 PC running on Azure. Does not Microsoft already offer this in the form of Azure …
I'm interested in which UNIXtm you think to use? AIX? Solaris? HP/UX? MacOS? (yes, really. MacOS X was UNIX certified at one time, not sure about now) because that's about it, and it's all pretty expensive and not that suitable for the desktop (believe me, I tried it when AIX was a more general OS rather than the server based OS it has become).
I don't think there is even any Audio/Video support in AIX any more (their Ultimedia Services hardware and supporting software went out of support around AIX 6.1).
Of course GNU/Linux or one of the various flavors of BSD may be a better choice.
Well, it's possibly the way forward for me, but not as MS might have intended!
I reckon this will allow me finally get rid of Windows off my laptop and replace it with Linux, and then be able to sign in to Windows 365 just to do my office work via the browser, yet leaving me free from Windows Woes in everything else that I do.
Given how destructive and hostile having your business computer connected to the Internet is now, ransomware and other hacking being prevalent now, I can now see this as a SO/HO and small business solution with legs for MS solutions providers. I've completely isolated anything of any importance form the 'net. Used to be the servers, now anything with data, period. Even defense in depth isn't sufficient as the malefactors wait long enough to defeat your recovery strategies.
Sign me up, he whimpers.
In theory it doesn't need to be powerful enough to run Windows; just a web browser, KVM and graphics card.
In fact I wonder if that's a driving force behind this; given the worldwide chip shortage and increasing scarcity of high-end PC hardware, this could be a way of keeping the revenue stream intact; replace "high-end PC" (which we don't have the chips for) with "low-end tablet + subscription"...
It's hardly naivete. Were this a startup, I'd agree with you and say it's capitalism. However, this is the dominant, abusive player in the market finding yet another way to suck still more money out of its customers, and finally gives MS an avenue to permanently attach the money-vac to customers for the Windows product. That's greed.
No, the driving force is pure greed. Its like EA. Made more money from their in game gambling cards (Ultimate Team) that selling the game. Microsoft want some of that pie and hope once someone buys Windows 365, they'll have to continue to pay monthly or yearly so constant cash coming in rather than sell the software once and letting the user use it for several years with no extra money coming in from that user.
Makes me want to cry.
"Am I missing the USP (for the customer, not MS) here?"
Well, sort of but it's not a very big one. The theory is that, in March of 2020 when everybody was being sent home, some IT people had a conversation something like this:
IT1: Everybody here was on desktops because they were cheaper five years ago. What can we do to keep them connected now?
IT2: Buy laptops?
IT1: We don't have the budget for that.
IT2: Have the users come in and take the desktops home with them?
IT1: They might not be able to store them and all the peripherals. Also it would be convenient if we didn't have to deal with all that physical security.
IT2: Have them remote in from something cheap?
IT1: That's a larger support cost if we send a bunch of people something like a Raspberry Pi and they've never seen Linux before.
IT2: Well, I'm out of options.
IT1: You know what would be convenient? Having something where the real computer runs on servers elsewhere and the users connect to that, assuming nobody ever runs into connection issues. That solves the physical security issue without having to keep a bunch of offices with desktops in it.
IT2: We can do that on our servers. Running VMs is possible.
IT1: It would be better if Microsoft did it.
IT2: No problem. I'll just call them and give them the idea, then activate this time freeze device and we can continue our conversation in sixteen months when everyone has gone with one of the other solutions already.
Had they done this in 2019, people would have used it. By now, most perspective users have figured out some other way to deal with the problem.
It means your employer doesn't need to provide you with a laptop for home office, they can argue, that you have a PC or tablet at home and can connect via that.
Letting private devices onto the corporate network is a big no-no in many sectors and providing home office users with a dedicated laptop is expensive, and, because it is also running on the home network, it is vulnerable to attacks from poorly configured devices on the home network.
Making the employee connect to a corporate image in the cloud (hopefully firewalled within the M365 instance) means that the vPC is secure (well, more secure than letting the user's malware riddled private device through the corporate VPN or a laptop on the user's network), can't be attacked by a malware infested device on your home network, it contains all the corporate (licensed) software, so no licensing problem or missing software and it means that it is under corporate group policies.
And if there is a problem, support can quickly bin the current vPC and roll a new one within minutes, instead of having to get the laptop delivered back to the office, reformatted, re-installed and delivered back to the user.
This is already available for business with Windows Azure Desktop. If this is corporately managed then that is what they will use as part of the Azure/M365 subscription. If this is aimed at the consumer then it is no different to a full PC at home.
In terms of using it, Windows on a tablet? There is no advantage.
For work use any laptop (or tablet) is going to fail or the DSE requirements anyway, particularly if you are essentially moving from work office with monitors etc to home with just a laptop.
This is all about getting Windows as a subscription out. People are conditioned to paying for everything now on a small monthly payment regardless of whether it ultimately costs them more and crucially, whether they actually own it, now or at the end. Look at the success of this system in the car sector.
Companies want stable revenue stream and subscriptions do that,. It also allows them to make more money overall because people are happy to spend quite large amounts per month for a service. This is just the first toe in the water to Windows becoming a subscription service with consumers. Stop paying and it stops working (worst case) or best case goes into some barely functional mode that is not usable.
People will buy (lease?) new hardware for a monthly payment just like a phone and the OS subscription will be included.
Enterprises are not far off that already with their M365 & Azure subscriptions anyway.
This is MS's answer to their wet dream of having Apple's walled garden.
I wonder how this will desl with users who need to run instances of software on their cloudy desk tops that MS doesn't have?
The good news is if everyone is virtually in one place, bad lads only need to crack one place.
How many were affected by the 366 breach a couple of months back.
Also, what telemetry can you limit?
An up vote for the reference to the Hemispheres album.
About Circumstances: "Lyrically, it is an autobiographical account by drummer Neil Peart about the time he spent living in England, and his eventual disillusionment with his then-current occupations" [source: Wikipedia
I remember sneaking this into the playlist of my Jazz FM show as part of a Neil Peart tribute 01/2020.
That's one way to get Win 11 running without having to upgrade any hardware. Call me cynical, but this offering would explain why MS seemingly wants everyone to buy new: Now we have the choice to rent instead.
What a time to be alive !
I'll stick to what works for me, thanks.
It is more secure than working on a home PC full of games and untrusted applications,
Eh ? Keeping files on some MS server to which god knows who has access to is more secure ? Who has been smoking what ? How much has the NSA helped create this ?
Oh, I suppose what they are saying is "The MS Windows that we provide is so insecure that you cannot trust it".
Then: what happens when your Internet connection is down or the MS servers are dead ? If it is all on your own machine then it is always available.
Yes: I do see that being able to access files from multiple machines is useful, but there have long been other ways of doing that.
The question is, who do you trust more? Microsoft and the NSA or the Russian and Chinese malware authors that control your employee's home networks?
I don't trust either, but I'd be happier with a "controlled" environment accessing my corporate resources than an uncontrolled environment.
It would be better if that was a hosted vPC in a local data centre, with no connections to the USA.
I wouldn't feel comfortable putting holes in my local firewall for untrusted devices to connect to local instances.
It is a trade-off, you have to take a risk somewhere along the line. As long as the Data Protection Officer is happy that every possible has been done to ensure everything is secure to the best available standards...
Indeed. It's good to see that there are still engineers tirelessly at work to ensure that Single Point Of Failure options remain available.
A Cloud PC. What a wonderful idea. Now, when (not if) the Cloud is down, not only will you not have access to your online files, but your system won't respond either, so you really can't do anything.
Microsoft : ensuring that downtime means downtime.
You've misunderstood the Book:-
A "new heaven" and "new earth" (Azure) replace the old heaven and old earth. There is no more suffering or death. (21:1–8) (no more need for patching).
God comes to dwell with humanity in the New Jerusalem. (21:2–8) (Bill walks amongst us/the poor, not in armoured helicopter).
Description of the New Jerusalem. (21:9–27) (Microsoft campus on Mars).
The River of Life and the Tree of Life appear for the healing of the nations and peoples. The curse of sin is ended. (22:1–5) (Linux is defeated and we are shown the way of the Cloud).
And in Conclusion:-
Bill's reassurance that Windows 12's coming is imminent. Final admonitions. (22:6–21)
Microsoft does not want it called VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). "We're not shipping anything that's infrastructure. We're providing all that as a back-end service... If you were to classify it, it would be most aligned with DaaS (Desktop as a Service),
Some mighty fine hair splitting there.
Reminds me of the pitch for PCs originally.
"Faster, and you don't need to share the CPU!".
My boss bit on it, CPU speed didn't make up for slow disk access.
"Cheaper!"
Well, no, not when the plethora of PCs needed individual attention, in bugs, network connections and upgrades.
"Compatible with the VAX compiler!"
No. The PC compiled code ran on a VAX, but VAX code didn't compile on PC's, a simplistic subset of VAX's.
The above was not even in the fine print.
And worse in the case of cloud: all business content is handed over to Microsoft. Businesses using Amazon have had their lunches eaten by Amazon, and I expect no different from Microsoft.
It's a full-blown Windows install on a full-blown VM running outside the private company network that needs access to the private company network, accessed from a full-fat web browser?
So instead of having to look after a VPN and roughly one PC-per-user, IT have to look after a virtual & a real PC per user, and a VPN.
And if a user makes a mistake and gets phished, rocks fall & everyone dies because they can't even shut it down or unplug it to limit the damage before calling IT.
What did I miss?
You can run a perfectly performant Windows VM in 2GB RAM and 64GB disk space. Yes, there are old machines and tiny laptops that can't provide that but you'd struggle to buy a "PC" today that doesn't exceed those requirements by an integer factor.
OTOH, there are certainly *apps* that need 8GB RAM or more, but that isn't a problem either because those apps wouldn't run on the old or tiny machine. In short, the overhead of running Windows in a VM on top of another OS is negligible.
Minimum requirements for 64bit Windows 10 in a Debian VM are 2GB RAM and 20GB disk space - PER IMAGE. Given that you'll need at least 2GB to run your host OS, that limits you to an absolute minimum of 4GB system memory. And even then it will run as well as you can expect from a system with the 'minimum' specifications (which as we all know will pretty much allow you to log in, and... that's it).
There are a huge number of systems out there still on 4GB. A 4GB system will be flattened by any VM architecture that you're trying to do real work on (unless you strip the guts out of the host OS, in which case why bother ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - a system running one VM with 100% system resources and nothing else is missing the point of virtualisation.
"For Windows 365 Business, we turn on Windows updates by default, matching the consumer scenario where updates are applied automatically. If we were to come up with something super disruptive, a different model, and forced that on enterprise customers, that would be an issue for them to accept this new solution."
So Windows updates are super disruptive? Who knew? (And good luck to Business customers trying to turn *off* Windows updates.)
So Suns (honoured be their memory) YP and NFS using diskless clients keeps coming back ? Only less well coded with higher resource requirements and no doubt, higher prices ? Now where did I stash those SPARC boxes and Solaris 2.6 CDs ? Ah yes, that round bin over there, years ago Sob.
This would be more like NCD or Wyse X-Terminals or IBM X-Stations.
With YP and NFS, processing was done locally (on your local machine), only the file systems were remote. And if you remember that far back, YP versions 1 and 2 and NFS security was not regarded as particularly stellar at the time, which meant that your filesystem security was also at risk. NFS 3 and particularly 4, backed up by something like Kerberos was better.
And the offline stuff? Well AFS and DCE/DFS had that covered in the 1990s, with their caching extensions.
By moving to a shared infrastructure you can operate using outdate/old/unsupported processors on whatever platform you want.
=climate win
By using virtual desktops you let the user have full control over the device they decide to use, browse what they want, download what they want
=user win
By offering this as a service you make the in-step cost lower/zero and allow companies to write off over the next few years any equipment they have purchased and managed for existing users.
=OPEX reliability
I appreciate there are the MS haters, but I have to say I think this is good, especially for the SMB.
"I appreciate there are the MS haters, but I have to say I think this is good, especially for the SMB."
And the written guarantee that the users data will never leave the sovereign borders or be subject to US law in any way shape or form? No NSA "security letters" to MS demanding data from other sovereign territories?
I love the arrogance of those on here slating end users and their malware and virus riddled devices and home networks.
By making such a statement you are also implying your own devices and connections are riddled too - oh yeh, that can’t be true as you’re sooooo professional.
How about giving your lowly user base a little credit as there’s definitely a portion who are acutely aware of the need to protect their own tech?
A few years ago I used to have a lot of friends and family asking for help when they’ve visited their local pron or download site and screwed themselves up. These days it’s far fewer and not for any other reason that they have learned their lessons in the past. Just like your assumption about ALL users my comment is based on a small section of people.
On the article I can confirm that within the organisation I work with I can 100% see the significant benefits of moving to this model and away from their current set up for a subset of users. Instead of managing multiple tiers of software and hardware to provision functional virtual desktops, a large chunk of change can be pocketed to a more simple model - depending on the pricing model of course.
It's not possible to guarantee systems are 100% riddle-free, correct? Ergo it must be assumed the systems are fallible and susceptible to compromise. We're all human.
Friends no longer ask for help removing dodgy pics and vids as no one gives a fuck - it's socially acceptable. This reinforces the laissez-faire attitude among users [1] (on home machines) that pros have to deal with (on business machines).
[1] This is the attitude that must be assumed is in effect when dealing with data security. What? Everything's peachy? More likely azure.
You must admit it's been a well executed plan to grab hold of ALL your data and intellectual property (and if you want to know what happens then, ask Stac Electronics).
First, sell people the whole "store it on our servers" idea by means of giving it a cute name like "cloud" and the usual golf memberships and expensive dinners, and now they're fully on board with that idea (read: they're locked in), play the next ball: "why don't you give us all the data you still store locally as well, including a full map of user behaviour".
I was wondering when the next step "bend over and take it" would happen, but I then realised that must have happened to get this whole farce started.
The only thing left now is to use the camera for "constant facial recognition", which is the technical term for being under permanent surveillance.
Loved computers since going to college to study in 90s. Most change has been nice and good. But this!! Makes me want to cry. I like Windows but don't like the direction cloud is going. Worried for a future job? Sure. But also that control is being taken away. I own all Columbo episodes on DVD. As none of the Streaming services I pay for show it, I've started ripping them all. Try doing that in 365. Will the overlords constantly monitor all instances? If they see any hacking, cracking or ripping software anywhere, will your sub be instantly cancelled?
I see this potentially failing. Maybe useful for some but the price. $31 a month for only a 4GB memory machine with a tiny amount of space. Fuck that.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
