Windows 10 will be the final Windows version as we know it - going to the cloud

Interesting article- After Windows 10, Windows will be running on the cloud. Personally I don't think this is a good idea, but if and when it is implemented we will find out how fast it will get adopted.

Microsoft Corporation Windows 10 To Be The Last Version Of Windows

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Arod95

Do you think they might do the same with Server 2016?

jibbajabba

Not sure how that would work in non-internet environments or secure environments like PCI-DSS.

Or in countries with "special" laws like Switzerland, where data is not allowed to leave the country..

xD Lucas

I'd imagine a lot of people will leave Windows to Linux, unless they offer a cloud-free variant.

My mother uses a Windows-based PC for her business, where they don't even offer high-speed. Are they just going to be left out in the dark?

Priston

I would hope this article is more accurate.
Why Microsoft is calling Windows 10 'the last version of Windows' | The Verge

zaleonardz

If they drop another 20 seacom cables, then yea, maybe....

but I can tell you that is not going to fly in South Africa...

TheStoddemeister

After having glanced over the Verge article posted by Priston, I must agree with him. I would rather have a solid platform that works that simply gets updates on a regular basis than an entire cloud-based OS. I can only slightly see how a cloud OS could work, maybe if the platform was cached on the local machine?

beads

Blame the NSA as they seem to be the only beneficiary of the idea.

- b/eads

--chris--

This feels an awful lot like when the Xbox one was going to be "always on" but then they canceled that with 3 months to spare...almost "hype'sh".

MTciscoguy

Well it seems Adobe has had some success with a model like this, and some of their products, but I think with the installed based of Windows machines world wide, it is going to be a much larger undertaking moving to the cloud model. Running the core program on the cloud might work, but I don't see a lot of people wanting to store their personal data that way. Large companies might benefit, but I don't know about personal users. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out.

--chris--

MTciscoguy wrote: »

Well it seems Adobe has had some success with a model like this, and some of their products, but I think with the installed based of Windows machines world wide, it is going to be a much larger undertaking moving to the cloud model.

Having a cloud option is one thing, having the entire product in the cloud and only in the cloud is something else completely.

MTciscoguy

--chris-- wrote: »

Having a cloud option is one thing, having the entire product in the cloud and only in the cloud is something else completely.

I said, Adobe has had some success, I said it would be interesting to see how this rolls out, I, however did not say it would be successful for Microsoft.

N2IT

Client OS's are ancient. Time to move into the 2020's. Everything should be cloud, can't wait.

Priston

Just wait until the cloud is in the cloud.... At work someone has nested Openstack on VMWare

OfWolfAndMan

I see this being a major privacy issue for many. I love cloud because I don't need much of a hard drive, but a completely cloud model could have many in protest.

MTciscoguy

N2IT wrote: »

Client OS's are ancient. Time to move into the 2020's. Everything should be cloud, can't wait.

What about those clients that like the OS on their machine, like me! It is going to take a long time to convince the older generation that the cloud is the way to go. I don't like someone else telling me how my OS should function, I like to be able to manipulate and customize my OS.

BlackBeret

That first article is the only one I have seen that even mentions the cloud. Every other article I have seen says it like this: The basic idea is that Windows 10 will just incremental updates much like Mac OS-X does. Instead of having Mac OS-XI etc, they give it incremental updates and call with names like snow leopard, etc.

gc8dc95

That is how I understand it as well. It is going to be the last full release, but will continually be built upon with updates. It is not likely that it will be a fully cloud OS anytime in the near future. It would be disastrous to consumers, business, and themselves.

Buckles

I remember watching an interview with Bill Gates seven or so years ago. He foresaw computer OS's moving to a cloud environment. I don't think he foresaw or predicted.. I'm going to suggest it was the business plan all along.

Iristheangel

N2IT wrote: »

Client OS's are ancient. Time to move into the 2020's. Everything should be cloud, can't wait.

Everything in the cloud wouldn't really work out in the real world. Especially in a lot of businesses.

First, it's pretty damn costly. One such company I've worked with got rid of all their servers and moved everything AWS. They estimated $50K/month for the hosting and it quickly ballooned into $500K/month. Let's just say there was fast migration back. Second, the lack of visibility into the hardware stack or other things in a cloud environment really rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I know plenty of companies that have seen their VMs freeze up and because they couldn't prove that it was the cloud provider's hardware or storage, they couldn't apply it to their SLA or get credits for this. I've seen this happen in Rackspace and AWS plenty of times. I know one company that just rebuilds their VMs when something goes awry but in reality, would you be blowing away a production VM and rebuilding it in your own data center? No. You'd troubleshoot it and get it the hell back up - but you don't have many troubleshooting options in a lot of these cloud environments. Third, there's a lot of compliance and security reasons that some industries just can't move their data to the cloud. Forth, if that cloud ever closes up shop or goes bankrupt, your data and intellectual property go with it. Fifth, your data and proprietary property might be at risk for something like this happening in your cloud provider: Extremely serious virtual machine bug threatens cloud providers everywhere | Ars Technica
Sixth, if you look at the terms and conditions for most cloud service providers, the SLAs aren't usually anywhere near the 5 9's. This doesn't work for some industries. It can also get pretty difficult proving it's them, not you, that's causing the outage. Other times, they just ask you to accept the downtime. A famous example would be: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2865802/verizon-warns-enterprise-cloud-users-of-48-hour-shutdown.html

Saying everything should be cloud or everything should be on-prem is just unrealistic. It's not black and white and I don't think it would work for all or even most companies to have everything in the cloud. The "cloud" isn't new at all and it's not a magical fix to all IT problems.

/rant. Sorry, you might be just referring to client OSes but since the article mentioned corporate Windows 10 and this looks like it'll apply to business, I ranted.. I just hear too many people think "cloud" fixes all things only to find themselves in a disaster.

N2IT

I work in a hosted environment all virtual and I have no complaints. In fact our whole team utilizes a VM session to do their daily task, I think it's great.

I like knowing my machine is backed up nightly.

Besides this offers a lot more control for large enterprises especially when dealing with security. With all budding technologies there will be limitations but as the architecture matures so will the product and the use of it.

Once storage (cost) begins to drop (and it will) you will see more and more companies slam all their goodies in the "cloud". Companies will be able to lower their SG&A by consolidating their IT staff into a MSP. It really doesn't make sense for companies to have FTE IT folks anymore, out sourcing these types of roles seem to be the in thing and rightfully so. Find an MSP who knows what their doing and run with it. Companies make money of their product and or service, not IT.

techfiend

You have to remember MSP's are much more expensive then desktop support employees, think of a 5 minute issue being a billable hour. You could a desktop support employee a lot less and it'd get done promptly for the same price and they can cover anything that happens the rest of that hour as well. I don't see how going to the cloud would significantly reduce the workload, it would just change. I work in about a 50/50 split of users on desktop/virtual desktop, I spend about 60% of my support time on the virtual side.

Considering how unstable office365 has been ime, I really don't look forward to microsoft basically hosting my operating system and paying a subscription for it. They'd really be shooting themselves in the foot if they went through with it.

Iristheangel

To add to techfiend's point, I don't really see the majority of MSPs staffing the highest skilled workers. In my experience, the companies tend to be paying more for the services and getting less skilled workers. Yes, there are exceptions but this tends to be the norm. Lot of workers in MSPs that are generalists and not specialists and MSPs tend to nickel and dime for additional services (i.e. CUCM upgrades, IOS upgrades, server OS upgrades, etc). These services are often seen as outside the scope of a typical MSP agreement. Plus you're not really getting the "A-Team" with an MSP vs Professional Services. Having someone around to make sure the lights are on and then having to pay additional money for them to do anything more than basic service gets costly. If it's a complex project, they might not be capable of doing it (well). Then you're paying even more for professional services to come in there and do that project. Costs go up.

Also, I would add that IT not making a company money really depends on industry and I think it's a cultural thing as well. I think a lot of people have it set in their heads that IT == cost and don't see opportunity. Instead, they focus on cutting cost to make their name in a company. For example, in the financial industry and Wall Street, having a high-availability network where you reduce the latency even in fractions of seconds can make the company money. In shopping malls, stadiums and retail, utilizing analytics over WiFi to track your shoppers, gain market data, push advertising through wireless, and perhaps even sell the data collected is a way to take that IT investment and turn it into revenue. In bank branches or financial securities firms, you can literally have a "remote expert" scale and meet with a client via video conferencing. In manufacturing and oil industries, I've seen wireless used as a way to track product and bring it to market faster. Did the business run before all these innovations? Yes. But these companies found a way to utilize their infrastructure and IT to bring their services to market faster and easier and/or create new avenues of profit.

If I was in management, I would rather be able to say that I invested $3M in investing in XYZ IT project which resulted in bringing added profit streams in, brought our product to market faster, reduce litigation, etc instead of being that person that cut $500K out of the budget by reducing headcount.

TheStoddemeister

I must agree that working with virtualization can be tricky and full of bugs. Another thing that I don't believe has been brought up is something like SOHO environments. Do these people who might have a simple POS app and need connection to the internet only for credit/debit card payments have to pay for this cloud service? In addition, Windows is one of the biggest home OSes, in this modern day where there is wireless services all about the place free or otherwise, they might not even bother with paying for internet. Would this nullify their OS when not connected? I don't think that Microsoft means "Windows as a service" means full cloud virtualization. I firmly believe that this will end up being like IOS devices, with updates being this service Microsoft is talking about. Even if it's not, I think that they might pull another Xbox One and pull out of that mindset mere months before release.

--chris--

Iristheangel wrote: »

Second, the lack of visibility into the hardware stack or other things in a cloud environment really rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I know plenty of companies that have seen their VMs freeze up and because they couldn't prove that it was the cloud provider's hardware or storage, they couldn't apply it to their SLA or get credits for this. I've seen this happen in Rackspace and AWS plenty of times. I know one company that just rebuilds their VMs when something goes awry but in reality, would you be blowing away a production VM and rebuilding it in your own data center? No. You'd troubleshoot it and get it the hell back up - but you don't have many troubleshooting options in a lot of these cloud environments.

This is something I have always said but its been quickly dismissed since "I don't know that to be a fact".

About7Narwhal

I'll be honest, I only glanced at the articles. But I feel certain that there will always be local operating systems. I think we might move more towards thin clients with internal "cloud" style computing. I cannot see my hospital environment making a move in the next ten years to cloud based from a third party. I just don't think there is enough security or trust. In fact, our health system has seriously started to consider moving away from Microsoft wherever possible. This includes OS deployments and productivity software.

varelg

... and since you handed over all your personal computing to the Microsoft cloud, the mighty corp shall and will make you pay for using its OS on your local machine. Or else... like for example, no access to your data anymore... etc...

varelg

xD Lucas wrote: »

I'd imagine a lot of people will leave Windows to Linux, unless they offer a cloud-free variant.

Sorry but I just can't see that switch to Linux happening any time soon. Or any time at all. Linux on the desktop is doomed. It is just so messed up, beyond all repair. Move to Mac makes much more sense.
We have already an example of a client- oriented cloud- based OS, the Chrome OS. How's its penetration into the market going?

techfiend

Linux has a strong foundation for a desktop os but lacks gui software for the masses. If there was a mass exodus I'd bet more go to linux then mac mainly for cost savings, that and they likely have employees that are familiar with it.

ChromeOS is doing better than most expected since its still around. I can't see it being useful in a corporate setting but it makes sense for students, where most of its share is.

I just applied for a cloud migration position, might be a fun challenge but probably not fun to support. In my current position microsoft hears from me almost weekly over the past few months because office365 not working right and it's beyond my control. It's not good when emails get sent but never received and no bounce back, even within the company, or can't send email under some silly condition, among other things. It usually takes 2-4 hours to fix but this week it took 3 days to fix one account. It used to be almost trouble free. Their health status on the admin dashboard lately is often degraded or recently recovered.

MTciscoguy

It is funny, people who work with computers for a living, always have these conversations every single time Microsoft makes a new move, I have been involved in these types of conversations for over 25 years now and what always happens, we continue the way we have been for a couple of decades, we continue to gripe about things, but for the most part the majority keep working with windows. A few will defect to Mac or Linux, but the majority will march on, with a MS OS on their system and then we will gripe some more in the future when they do something else.

About7Narwhal

@MTciscoguy:

I think MS has a good position going for them. They are the business powerhouse that almost every business application is created for. That alone means most people will stick with MS and put up with whatever changes they make simply because they have no alternatives that are practical/effective.