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Microsoft Reportedly Working On a 'Lightweight Version of Windows' Known As 'Cloud Shell' (neowin.net)

Posted by BeauHD on from the always-with-you dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: Last week, details emerged of Microsoft's plans to develop a single, unified, 'adaptive shell' for Windows 10. Known as the 'Composable Shell', or CSHELL, the company's efforts were said to be focused on establishing a universal Windows 10 version with a standardized framework to scale and adapt the OS to any type of device, display size or user experience, including smartphones, PCs, tablets, consoles, large touchscreens, and more. Today, Petri reported that Microsoft is working on a new shell for Windows known as 'Cloud Shell'. According to internal documentation referred to in that report, Cloud Shell is described as a "lightweight version of Windows designed for the modern computing world." It also hints at plans to introduce the Cloud Shell sometime in 2017 -- but little else is known about the new shell besides that. Cloud Shell is said to be connected, in some way, with the Windows Store and Universal Windows Platform app framework, and the report speculates that it may also be related to Microsoft's plans to bring the full version of Windows 10 to mobile devices with ARM-based processors, which it announced in December. However, the cloud nomenclature, and the reference to this being a 'lightweight' version of Windows could hint at a 'thin client'-style approach, in which the Windows 10 shell could be streamed from Microsoft's Azure platform to any device with an internet connection, while its cloud servers remotely handle all of the processing and storage requirements of each users' tasks.

4 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. The Cloud by backslashdot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Nowadays everything wants to connect to the cloud. I mean you pull up Apple or Google maps on a phone and it can't even display a generic map showing where you are. It insists on asking the cloud. Yet somehow the OS is like 16 gigabytes in size. How can it take up 16 gigabytes when it doesn't know anything?

  2. Chrome OS? by jfdavis668 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Doesn't this sound awfully like the Chrome OS? Just Microsoft running the servers instead of Google?

  3. Re:Yay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    People often don't know what they want, until they're given it, there's the (possibly apocryphal) Henry Ford quote:

    If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse".

  4. See how the mighty had fallen ... by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Interesting
    20 years ago, someone would have a bright idea. Some venture capitalists might see some potential. They will work feverishly on it. Microsoft might get a wind of it. And it will just release a press release saying it is considering working on the same idea. That's it. The VCs will flee like they had seen ebola. Funding gone, the startup will die.

    Now people just make fun of Microsoft, when it says vaguely plausible things they might have actually invested on. Even stupid idea like warehousing products in the near earth orbit and delivering packages using Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles by Amazon would be discussed seriously. But Microsoft? nah! No one believes it can do what it says it wants to do. Including the VP in charge of the project.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact