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.

Comments

Much as I hate Microsoft

[GerryGilmore]

Calling their new product Weapons of Mass Destruction is just going too darned far!!

Re:Much as I hate Microsoft

[msauve]

But give them points for honesty.

Re: Much as I hate Microsoft

[datavirtue]

Windows VD. Get it?

Personal Computing is dead

[110010001000]

This is pretty much the end goal of corporations. They want to turn the PC to a remote desktop on in cloud that you need to pay for each month. In addition it provides perfect DRM and control over the user. The PC era was great, but it couldn't last once the MBA's moved in.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[110010001000]

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.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[msauve]

Next, they'll come up with a way of running batch jobs, instead of 3270 sessions to the mainframe^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h cloud.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[NicknameUnavailable]

There's two sides to this:

• Corporations want to spy on you to sell your data for increased revenue.
• Automation is not properly priced into the economy and it's genuinely causing havok.

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.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[JustNiz]

Replace the name PC with "dumb terminal", the name "cloud" with mainframe, and the the billable period of month with "CPU second" and you have exactly the IBM paradigm that got Microsoft their start by providing a far saner desktop-local alternative to.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[The123king]

*I think you'll find that the NeXTstep is the foundation of Mac OS X/macOS

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[mangastudent]

The issue, as I understand it, with your thesis is that economists haven't been able to find productivity gains from the widespread adoption of software like Excel. You ought to see more economic activity per person, but ... who knows, maybe Parkinson's law is in play, ""work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", maybe we programmers are to blame for the vast expansion of government intrusion in the economy because our tools like Excel have allowed companies to cope without bankrupting (more of) them, maybe the economists' metrics are somehow wrong.

Because it's computationally intensive

[astank]

To run a Word Processor.

Please explain this to me...

[RecycledElectrons]

Please tell me, does my Virtual Desktop connect to a Microsoft server in the cloud, or can I run my own server?

So, is it WMD or WVD ?

[fahrbot-bot]

Either way, I hear Iraq won't have -- I mean, subscribe to -- them ... sorry MS.

Re:So, is it WMD or WVD ?

[WoodstockJeff]

I thought it was short for "Windows Made Difficult".