5 ms·

Windows-as-an-app is coming

34 points by elorant 3y ago

coldacid 3y ago
Everything going to "the Cloud" is just a backslide into the mainframe era, but with shinier graphics. I feel like the age of micros has ended, killed off by clueless users with flashy phones.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It's just one of the usual cycles. Enough time has gone by that most people have forgotten (or weren't alive) during the last server era. They aren't fresh on what the serious downsides of it are, or why the PC revolution was such a step forward. But people will be reminded (lots are already beginning to see) and the pendulum will swing back away from using someone else's server. Then after a couple decades, the pendulum will swing back again. Rinse and repeat.
  - rthnbgrredf 3y ago
    Could someone who remember the era of mainframe computing, which of the downsides could apply to the modern version of it (cloud desktop)?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      The two main ones are that there's more moving parts to go wrong, and that you're at the mercy of the people running the server. When the server malfunctions, there's nothing you can do but wait for them to fix it, the provider can mess up your account in unpredictable ways leading to unexpected interruptions of service and/or loss of data, and so forth. There are numerous smaller things, too, such as reduced flexibility and such. Also, communications can and do suffer interruptions, and if you're using a remote server then such interruptions can be problematic. My point isn't that "the cloud" is a bad model, though. It's that it involves a different set of risks and tradeoffs. For a given use case, "cloud" may be the best solution. For others, it won't be.
      - xethos 3y ago
        > and that you're at the mercy of the people running the server Perhaps slightly dated, but still relevant and hilarious: The Bastard Operator from Hell http://bofh.bjash.com/ http://bofh.bjash.com/
- agumonkey 3y ago
  these wave are recurrent, the opposite will probably come soon after that
- seanhunter 3y ago
  That's a snappy take, but it definitely doesn't feel that way to me as someone who did use mainframes a bit and big shared unix servers(not mainframes) quite a lot at points in my career. The defining characteristic of the mainframe experience for me is extreme rigidity. Upgrades are practically impossible, scheduling time on the mainframe requires lots of forward planning, notice or having a close relationship with a sysop that you can buy drinks for to get jobs to jump the queue. Cloud on the other hand brings scaling on demand scale up/scale down for bursty workloads, very quick to experiment with different configurations etc. The exact opposite - flexibility is very much the name of the game. Shared unix servers (not mainframes) were also very different from cloud in this way but also had the difference that you were always in very noticeable contention for CPU and io with other users, whereas on cloud you are almost always on dedicated resources for your use case. I never really felt contention on mainframe workloads because they are so goddamn slow all the time it's pretty much impossible to tell if you're contended or not.
hulitu 3y ago
> Windows-as-an-App Is Coming To do what ? Running on bare hardware is a challenge for Windows.
- doubled112 3y ago
  Windows on bare metal to run Edge to run Windows-as-an-app Sounds simple to me /s Think of all of the telemetry data possible this way!
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > To do what ? Is it not obvious? It's the same purpose as XCode Cloud and Ubuntu Pro and Office 365; force users to pay recurring fees for basic functionality. This is what service-ification of completely normal software looks like, our penance for not caring enough as consumers.
  - dingnuts 3y ago
    The "basic functionality" that an OS provides requires constant maintenance from the vendor. You're welcome to use Windows XP if you want, and then you can enjoy not having new device drivers for modern hardware or patches to protect against new attack vectors. Or is Microsoft supposed to patch security vulnerabilities forever, after your one time purchase? I don't like subscriptions for everything but don't act as though an OS, which must receive continuous updates -- continuous labor from the vendor -- in order to remain secure and thus be usable as an Internet appliance, which is its primary purpose today, is not already a subscription service even if it is not priced as one.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      Constant maintenance does not entail running an OS on their servers and RDPing into it. I have a capable machine, I can service it myself. If Microsoft wants to EOL OSes after a one-time purchase, that is their prerogative. There is a distinct difference in expectation between subscription OSes and LTS releases, though. That's why Microsoft can value a Windows license at hundreds of dollars. OS vendors have a continued interest in supporting my hardware so they can exploit me as a customer. If Microsoft makes too hasty of a move, they know they'll just push their users onto competing platforms that don't charge for 5+ years of support. Stuff like MacOS, ChromeOS or even Linux.
kotaKat 3y ago
This still requires a subscription to, say, Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows Cloud PC, and those prices still aren't terribly appetizing. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/all-pricing https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/all-pricing (Sidebar: I actually signed up for a trial and somehow Microsoft decided to terminate it not even a day into the trial with zero warning, so I immediately gave up and am annoyed I spent half a day loading software and already starting to use the damn thing.)
crowcroft 3y ago
The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  All without internet connectivity.
- thegrim33 3y ago
  Would never be appealing to me in the slightest, having my compute taken away from me and put in someone else's control to siphon away even more data about me, where they have the power to shut my compute off if I violate their TOS, accidentally or not, where I'd lose what little remaining privacy I have left. Of course it'll end up that way in the end eventually, as the enshitification continues; no way would companies and governments not want all that extra data and control.
  - riskable 3y ago
    When AI gets involved it suddenly starts making sense because your laptop's GPU a little baby toy compared to an entire data center running the latest & greatest GPU/AI accelerators. It might be that every day (e.g. regular people) AI use cases don't scale much beyond 64GB of VRAM though in which case it's only a matter of time before laptops have such capabilities.
    - crowcroft 3y ago
      My sense is that AI models will need to be able to run on relatively low powered eventually, just purely for the economics of it to work out. Still a lot of unknowns though.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
visarga 3y ago
What a great idea to start a video fixed in the bottom right corner so you can't scroll it away. While reading the article it didn't distract me at all. /s
sonicanatidae 3y ago
So fucking tired of subscriptions.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I avoided this fatigue by not doing subscriptions at all. It works great for me, but YMMV.
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    I avoid them in my personal life, but stuck with them in my professional life. :|
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I don't count subscriptions connected with my work because those are my employer's subscriptions, not mine. My employer can, and does, have different preferences about these things than I do.
      - sonicanatidae 3y ago
        I detest the Subscription model so very much, that I hate it on behalf of my company. lol
danpalmer 3y ago
I'm not quite sure I get the strategy. For people who need Windows for some business requirement, this lets them use less Windows, and have a Mac or Chromebook as their hardware. The result: less Windows. For people who don't currently use Windows, does a slower, internet-only Windows present a compelling product? Windows doesn't really sell itself (other than as a gaming platform, but we have Nvidia's streaming platform for that), it's a default but if you've not got a business need most people either already have Windows (because the PC was cheap or they play games) or they aren't going to go looking for Windows. As Windows becomes more and more of a platform for ongoing revenue (read: ads, subscriptions), it's likely to become less attractive for that second group, and that first group will spend less time with it (and see fewer ads). I get that on-demand cloud machines make sense for many businesses, but I'm not sure that aligns well with my (very naive) understanding of Microsoft's priorities here.
- secfirstmd 3y ago
  One big area will be security.
  - 0xNotMyAccount 3y ago
    Yep, this is Microsoft's answer to the terrible Citrix user experience, which is a non-trivial component of burnout in healthcare. Every hospital basically tells their staff, several times a day, via an electronic health record system served over Citrix: we don't trust you, and you time is worthless, fuck you. All in the name of security.
    - steve1977 3y ago
      What is so bad about Citrix nowadays? I’m not in the loop anymore but I did Citrix about 15-20 years ago (geez…) and it was working very well and our users liked it. So that was Metaframe XP on Windows Server 2000 and 2003 back then.
    - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
      Ummmm, we use Citrix to get remote desktops and it's fine. Seems like somethibg specific to your setup that's the problem.
TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
I think this is what I imagined when I first heard of “Windows Live”. It never lived up to the name.
godzillabrennus 3y ago
This article is nonsense. Microsoft intentionally made it hard and expensive for innovative companies to try and deliver Windows as a service through a browser for years. They didn’t want to hurt their lucrative OEM licensing business. This made it a thing for enterprise customers.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  What do you mean? OEM licensing isn’t the same as enterprise volume licensing. And the latter is per seat/user anyway. Plenty of projects deliver remote rdp session over a browser fine. It even works better than VNC in the browser. What was Microsoft doing to make it hard exactly?
riidom 3y ago
Waaa.
_chu1 3y ago
What if I just run a bunch of cryptominers on my Windows 365 instance? Either way this is gross and I guarantee people will just accept that. To unintentionally quote Deus Ex, Some people don't see the danger of indiscriminate surveillance.
imsurgio 3y ago
Microsoft is always late to the party.

34 points by elorant 3y ago

Everything going to "the Cloud" is just a backslide into the mainframe era, but with shinier graphics. I feel like the age of micros has ended, killed off by clueless users with flashy phones.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JohnFen 3y ago
It's just one of the usual cycles. Enough time has gone by that most people have forgotten (or weren't alive) during the last server era. They aren't fresh on what the serious downsides of it are, or why the PC revolution was such a step forward. But people will be reminded (lots are already beginning to see) and the pendulum will swing back away from using someone else's server. Then after a couple decades, the pendulum will swing back again. Rinse and repeat.
- rthnbgrredf 3y ago
  Could someone who remember the era of mainframe computing, which of the downsides could apply to the modern version of it (cloud desktop)?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    The two main ones are that there's more moving parts to go wrong, and that you're at the mercy of the people running the server. When the server malfunctions, there's nothing you can do but wait for them to fix it, the provider can mess up your account in unpredictable ways leading to unexpected interruptions of service and/or loss of data, and so forth. There are numerous smaller things, too, such as reduced flexibility and such. Also, communications can and do suffer interruptions, and if you're using a remote server then such interruptions can be problematic. My point isn't that "the cloud" is a bad model, though. It's that it involves a different set of risks and tradeoffs. For a given use case, "cloud" may be the best solution. For others, it won't be.
    - xethos 3y ago
      > and that you're at the mercy of the people running the server Perhaps slightly dated, but still relevant and hilarious: The Bastard Operator from Hell http://bofh.bjash.com/ http://bofh.bjash.com/
agumonkey 3y ago
these wave are recurrent, the opposite will probably come soon after that
seanhunter 3y ago
That's a snappy take, but it definitely doesn't feel that way to me as someone who did use mainframes a bit and big shared unix servers(not mainframes) quite a lot at points in my career. The defining characteristic of the mainframe experience for me is extreme rigidity. Upgrades are practically impossible, scheduling time on the mainframe requires lots of forward planning, notice or having a close relationship with a sysop that you can buy drinks for to get jobs to jump the queue. Cloud on the other hand brings scaling on demand scale up/scale down for bursty workloads, very quick to experiment with different configurations etc. The exact opposite - flexibility is very much the name of the game. Shared unix servers (not mainframes) were also very different from cloud in this way but also had the difference that you were always in very noticeable contention for CPU and io with other users, whereas on cloud you are almost always on dedicated resources for your use case. I never really felt contention on mainframe workloads because they are so goddamn slow all the time it's pretty much impossible to tell if you're contended or not.

hulitu 3y ago

> Windows-as-an-App Is Coming To do what ? Running on bare hardware is a challenge for Windows.

doubled112 3y ago
Windows on bare metal to run Edge to run Windows-as-an-app Sounds simple to me /s Think of all of the telemetry data possible this way!
smoldesu 3y ago
> To do what ? Is it not obvious? It's the same purpose as XCode Cloud and Ubuntu Pro and Office 365; force users to pay recurring fees for basic functionality. This is what service-ification of completely normal software looks like, our penance for not caring enough as consumers.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  The "basic functionality" that an OS provides requires constant maintenance from the vendor. You're welcome to use Windows XP if you want, and then you can enjoy not having new device drivers for modern hardware or patches to protect against new attack vectors. Or is Microsoft supposed to patch security vulnerabilities forever, after your one time purchase? I don't like subscriptions for everything but don't act as though an OS, which must receive continuous updates -- continuous labor from the vendor -- in order to remain secure and thus be usable as an Internet appliance, which is its primary purpose today, is not already a subscription service even if it is not priced as one.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Constant maintenance does not entail running an OS on their servers and RDPing into it. I have a capable machine, I can service it myself. If Microsoft wants to EOL OSes after a one-time purchase, that is their prerogative. There is a distinct difference in expectation between subscription OSes and LTS releases, though. That's why Microsoft can value a Windows license at hundreds of dollars. OS vendors have a continued interest in supporting my hardware so they can exploit me as a customer. If Microsoft makes too hasty of a move, they know they'll just push their users onto competing platforms that don't charge for 5+ years of support. Stuff like MacOS, ChromeOS or even Linux.

kotaKat 3y ago

This still requires a subscription to, say, Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows Cloud PC, and those prices still aren't terribly appetizing. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/all-pricing https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/all-pricing (Sidebar: I actually signed up for a trial and somehow Microsoft decided to terminate it not even a day into the trial with zero warning, so I immediately gave up and am annoyed I spent half a day loading software and already starting to use the damn thing.)

crowcroft 3y ago

The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.

nashashmi 3y ago
All without internet connectivity.
thegrim33 3y ago
Would never be appealing to me in the slightest, having my compute taken away from me and put in someone else's control to siphon away even more data about me, where they have the power to shut my compute off if I violate their TOS, accidentally or not, where I'd lose what little remaining privacy I have left. Of course it'll end up that way in the end eventually, as the enshitification continues; no way would companies and governments not want all that extra data and control.
- riskable 3y ago
  When AI gets involved it suddenly starts making sense because your laptop's GPU a little baby toy compared to an entire data center running the latest & greatest GPU/AI accelerators. It might be that every day (e.g. regular people) AI use cases don't scale much beyond 64GB of VRAM though in which case it's only a matter of time before laptops have such capabilities.
  - crowcroft 3y ago
    My sense is that AI models will need to be able to run on relatively low powered eventually, just purely for the economics of it to work out. Still a lot of unknowns though.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

visarga 3y ago

What a great idea to start a video fixed in the bottom right corner so you can't scroll it away. While reading the article it didn't distract me at all. /s

sonicanatidae 3y ago

So fucking tired of subscriptions.

JohnFen 3y ago
I avoided this fatigue by not doing subscriptions at all. It works great for me, but YMMV.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  I avoid them in my personal life, but stuck with them in my professional life. :|
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I don't count subscriptions connected with my work because those are my employer's subscriptions, not mine. My employer can, and does, have different preferences about these things than I do.
    - sonicanatidae 3y ago
      I detest the Subscription model so very much, that I hate it on behalf of my company. lol

danpalmer 3y ago

I'm not quite sure I get the strategy. For people who need Windows for some business requirement, this lets them use less Windows, and have a Mac or Chromebook as their hardware. The result: less Windows. For people who don't currently use Windows, does a slower, internet-only Windows present a compelling product? Windows doesn't really sell itself (other than as a gaming platform, but we have Nvidia's streaming platform for that), it's a default but if you've not got a business need most people either already have Windows (because the PC was cheap or they play games) or they aren't going to go looking for Windows. As Windows becomes more and more of a platform for ongoing revenue (read: ads, subscriptions), it's likely to become less attractive for that second group, and that first group will spend less time with it (and see fewer ads). I get that on-demand cloud machines make sense for many businesses, but I'm not sure that aligns well with my (very naive) understanding of Microsoft's priorities here.

secfirstmd 3y ago
One big area will be security.
- 0xNotMyAccount 3y ago
  Yep, this is Microsoft's answer to the terrible Citrix user experience, which is a non-trivial component of burnout in healthcare. Every hospital basically tells their staff, several times a day, via an electronic health record system served over Citrix: we don't trust you, and you time is worthless, fuck you. All in the name of security.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    What is so bad about Citrix nowadays? I’m not in the loop anymore but I did Citrix about 15-20 years ago (geez…) and it was working very well and our users liked it. So that was Metaframe XP on Windows Server 2000 and 2003 back then.
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    Ummmm, we use Citrix to get remote desktops and it's fine. Seems like somethibg specific to your setup that's the problem.

TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago

I think this is what I imagined when I first heard of “Windows Live”. It never lived up to the name.

godzillabrennus 3y ago

This article is nonsense. Microsoft intentionally made it hard and expensive for innovative companies to try and deliver Windows as a service through a browser for years. They didn’t want to hurt their lucrative OEM licensing business. This made it a thing for enterprise customers.

eddythompson80 3y ago
What do you mean? OEM licensing isn’t the same as enterprise volume licensing. And the latter is per seat/user anyway. Plenty of projects deliver remote rdp session over a browser fine. It even works better than VNC in the browser. What was Microsoft doing to make it hard exactly?

riidom 3y ago

Waaa.

_chu1 3y ago

What if I just run a bunch of cryptominers on my Windows 365 instance? Either way this is gross and I guarantee people will just accept that. To unintentionally quote Deus Ex, Some people don't see the danger of indiscriminate surveillance.

imsurgio 3y ago

Microsoft is always late to the party.