Re: mythical Year Of Linux On the Desktop comes
Most of the apps are done: most users aren't using special software, they are using office apps, and they just about work in the cloud today, and will improve further as that is where Microsoft's office product investment is going.
My employer is a >100K people organisation and pays a lot of money to Microsoft. Our IT dept are pushing Microsoft hard to make "dumb PC working with cloud apps and data" work well enough that they can switch 90% of users to that (the remainder are developers who already use Linux). Mainly for two reasons: security (get all the corporate data of the user's device and strictly under their control), and cost of support (if something breaks - just give the user a new device and it immediately just works).
Today the biggest issues with this model are that the cloud version of the Office apps don't work quite well enough for the power users (cloud Excel is too slow for finance, cloud Powerpoint is too restrictive for marketing, etc). The other issue is that the model still doesn't work for power-travellers (sales people working from trains or planes, mom-and-pop hotels with crap internet or customer sites with no guest wifi) who need all their data and apps locally.
Once Microsoft fix those problems, our IT plan to stop supporting desktops/laptops except as cloud access devices. I am guessing 70% of users in our company will then move to a "chromebook" type of device, that is if they need a keyboard and mouse at all and can't just use a tablet.
They already offer a desktop build for that but not many depts will take it up yet.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
