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Microsoft To Bring Multi-User Virtualization To Windows, Office With Windows Virtual Desktop Service (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: On Sept. 24, Microsoft announced what it's calling the Windows Virtual Desktop (WMD). WVD will allow users to virtualize Windows 7 and 10, Office 365 ProPlus apps and other third-party applications by running them remotely in Azure virtual machines. Using WMD, customers will be able to provide remote desktop sessions with multiple users logged into the same Windows 10 or Windows Server virtual machine. They also can opt to virtualize the full desktop or individual Microsoft Store and/or line-of-business applications. The WMD service also supports full VDI with Windows 10 and Windows 7, Microsoft officials told Ars Technica. (Those wanting to virtualize Windows 7 after Microsoft support ends in January 2020 will be able to do so for three years without paying for Extended Security Updates.)
Licenses for WVD will be provided for no additional cost as part of Windows Enterprise and Education E3 and E5 subscriptions. The aforementioned Windows 10 Enterprise for Virtual Desktops edition won't be released as a separate version of Windows 10 at all. That name is just for licensing purposes, officials said. Microsoft officials said a public preview of WVD will be available later this year, and those interested can request notification of the preview's availability. To use WVD, users need an Azure subscription and will be charged for the storage and compute their virtual machines use. Microsoft also plans to offer WVD via Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers and is working with third parties like Citrix to build on top of WVD, officials said.
Licenses for WVD will be provided for no additional cost as part of Windows Enterprise and Education E3 and E5 subscriptions. The aforementioned Windows 10 Enterprise for Virtual Desktops edition won't be released as a separate version of Windows 10 at all. That name is just for licensing purposes, officials said. Microsoft officials said a public preview of WVD will be available later this year, and those interested can request notification of the preview's availability. To use WVD, users need an Azure subscription and will be charged for the storage and compute their virtual machines use. Microsoft also plans to offer WVD via Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers and is working with third parties like Citrix to build on top of WVD, officials said.
Yes, but the NEXT step is that your ISP will only allow you to use one of the cloud services for your desktop. If you don't think that will happen, you haven't been paying attention.
That second one is the real issue, because if you automate 1,000 jobs with a program (Excel alone takes care of about a dozen at every mid sized company to achieve the same efficiency they would without it) then the person who wrote the program gets paid likely hourly or salary, the company that wrote it gets an initial contract (for custom work) or if they are really lucky and can make it generic enough they get a much smaller sale every few years adding up to more than a single custom contract. Neither case really makes up the economic impact (e.g. you lost 1,000 minimum wage jobs for a 100k contract and the net on the economy is about -$14,440,000/year - -$14,340,000 the first year for the pissant contractor who "got" the work.)
This is a major issue, as we've experienced compounding automation in computers of this form since the 80's - absolutely wrecking the economy in the process (most of this gets covered up in the compounding inflation rate of ~2.5%/year, but if you adjust the average take-home back then with today you'll see a major decline.)
Software corporations have every reason to stop this from their standpoint (an operating system can only do so much before it's effectively "done" and you can't get people to buy new versions of it - at which point your entire industry collapses without a subscription model,) but more importantly, we're heading toward a world where most of the jobs are automated and the only ones benefiting from it are the guys who got a chair (pun intended) when the music stopped.
For the sake of the economy as a whole we need to seriously consider taxes on automation which feed back into a UBI program (at the very least) equal to a sizable percentage of the savings, back-dated to when the automation started. It's too late to simply say "if you automate a position pay 50% of those wages into a pool for UBI, every year just like you would have paid the wages before the automation" because we're long beyond the point where that would be an equitable amount to cover basic needs, and going much beyond 50% would discourage further automation (which if done right, does actually benefit everyone - this isn't meant to be some Luddite dribble post.)
TL;DR: tax automation (including what is already in place) at a mere half of the displaced wages and we'll have the same exact fully-functional infrastructure of the modern world and enough UBI that everyone can own a home without debt - it's that fucking extreme of an issue.