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The End of the Desktop? (computerworld.com)
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ComputerWorld : Of course, at one time, to get any work done with a computer, you first had to learn a lot, about computers, operating systems, commands and more. Eventually, "friendly" became the most important adverb in computing circles, and we've reached the point in user-friendliness that people don't even talk about it anymore. Today, Google has shown with its Chrome OS that most of us can pretty much do anything we need to do on a computer with just a web browser. But Google's path is not Microsoft's path. Instead, it's moving us first to Windows as desktop as a service (DaaS) via Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD). This bundles Windows 10 Enterprise, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security and cloud-based system management into Microsoft 365 Enterprise.
The next step, Windows Virtual Desktop, enables companies to virtualize Windows 7 and 10, Office 365 ProPlus apps and other third-party applications on Azure-based virtual machines. If all goes well, you'll be able to subscribe to Windows Virtual Desktop this fall. Of course, Virtual Desktop is a play for business users -- for now. I expect Virtual Desktop to be offered to consumers in 2020. By 2025, Windows as an actual desktop operating system will be a niche product. Sound crazy? Uh, you do know that Microsoft already really, really wants you to "rent" Office 365 rather than buy Office 2019, don't you?
But what about games, you say? We'll always have Windows for games! Will we? Google, with its Google Stadia gaming cloud service, is betting we're ready to move our games to the cloud as well. It's no pipe dream. Valve has been doing pretty well for years now with its Steam variation on this theme. So where is all this taking us? I see a world where the PC desktop disappears for all but a few. Most of us will be writing our documents, filling out our spreadsheets and doing whatever else we now do on our PCs via cloud-based applications on smart terminals running Chrome OS or Windows Lite. If you want a "real" PC, your choices are going to be Linux or macOS.
The next step, Windows Virtual Desktop, enables companies to virtualize Windows 7 and 10, Office 365 ProPlus apps and other third-party applications on Azure-based virtual machines. If all goes well, you'll be able to subscribe to Windows Virtual Desktop this fall. Of course, Virtual Desktop is a play for business users -- for now. I expect Virtual Desktop to be offered to consumers in 2020. By 2025, Windows as an actual desktop operating system will be a niche product. Sound crazy? Uh, you do know that Microsoft already really, really wants you to "rent" Office 365 rather than buy Office 2019, don't you?
But what about games, you say? We'll always have Windows for games! Will we? Google, with its Google Stadia gaming cloud service, is betting we're ready to move our games to the cloud as well. It's no pipe dream. Valve has been doing pretty well for years now with its Steam variation on this theme. So where is all this taking us? I see a world where the PC desktop disappears for all but a few. Most of us will be writing our documents, filling out our spreadsheets and doing whatever else we now do on our PCs via cloud-based applications on smart terminals running Chrome OS or Windows Lite. If you want a "real" PC, your choices are going to be Linux or macOS.
It is also the year of the Linux desktop!
Granted sales have been declining steadily but we're about as close to the end of the desktop as we are to End times.
How will I own any of my data if I don't have a place in my house to store it all?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Not happening. People like to mod their games.
You can have my PC when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Serious question. If all the apps are "cloud" based, why would anyone want the hassles of running windows (even virtualized) in their environment?
I don't work with client stations, but over the last couple years, the college I work for has added around a thousand Chromebooks. These have had zero admin overhead. At the same time, there is a staff of 5 full time people dedicated to trying to keep the client machines running windows functional, and failing.
I swear, we get these so often.. desktops are dead / desktops are dying..
Yeah yeah, sure the vast number of phone/tablet/mobile users are a significant portion of traffic.
However I think these fairly regular announcements of the death of desktop computing are ... hyperbolic "outrage bait"
There will always be a place for desktop machines.. PC gaming / VR, Music and video production/editing, development, 3d modeling/ graphic design, all these things are going to keep PCs on desktops for a long time yet IMHO
The Digital Sorceress
How will this work when you want to actually do work and aren't connected to the Internet? Yes, there are plenty of places on Earth without 4G, 5G, or fast WiFi. (Even in a major US university's library in 2019, cell signals are blocked by the building, and WiFi is spotty at best.)
Satan Nerdella wants to take us back to the good old days of dumb terminals. Good for Microsoft who can nickel and dime users for everything that they do, bad for the actual user.
I'm a troglodyte with terrible internet, but I'll be conducting all my desktop activities in the cloud!
Pull your head out of your first world ass.
I donno..... I know a heck of a lot of people who might have trouble with this kind of scenario, especially if running production applications requires a network connection.
Laptops/desktops are musical instruments and running things behind the scenes like lighting and projections and stuff at concerts and installations. This kind of thing is my semi-pro hobby, and in general, you want all these machines to have networking completely disabled while shows are active (unless you have devices talking over a LAN, but even then you don't need Internet).
"If you want a "real" PC, your choices are going to be Linux ..."
Problems I have with that: zero.
It isn't dead until Netcraft confirms it.
1990s - Will terminal services bring the end of the desktop?
2000s - Will the internet bring the end of the desktop?
2010s - Will tablets bring the end of the desktop?
I'm guessing no.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
We've had games in the cloud for almost a decade now, with four major providers and soon to be a fifth. It still only makes up about the same market share as the Linux desktop.
You're investing in hardware that you don't get to use for your purposes, will never be upgraded on your schedule, selling you games that are at or higher than MSRP (despite savings on physical manufacturing and distribution and in-store display and promotional no competition for sales, no used market, and skyrocketing bandwidth use. You can't even take your savegame to another platform if you decide to go somewhere else.
There's nothing but downsides, and the only market that would probably go for this are already gaming on cellphones.
We'll see if it will be by 2025 or not but I'm willing to bet the adoption rate will be much slower than that. I think as the mass starts to realize storing all of their work, data, porn, and etc. in the cloud only is a really bad idea.
One day one of these articles will be correct and everyone will forget the 100 previous times over the last 20 years the end of the desktop was predicted.
Sheeple are consumers, the biggest market segment, they don't need to keep their data on their own computer, their creativity is limited to sticking texts on images, liking silly posts on various "social" networks and stuff like that, no need for anything but a tablet or at most a chromebook.
Chuckle
.... I can't imagine how bad the article is.
A desktop is still useful for development work; i.e. serial ports are actually still necessary for interfacing with some other hardware. But that's less than 1% of the computer market. As soon as gaming consoles become upgradable and offer performance on par with desktops, the gaming market for desktops disappears entirely (it's already doomed because it's easier to cheat on a PC than a console). Most office work now can be and is done on a laptop. And a tablet with a keyboard is now indistinguishable from a laptop. I once working on an ion beam microscope that had several PCs embedded in the hardware (one of which even booted off a floppy!); there is always a niche market for desktop hardware.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You can have my desktop when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
...Dell Windows desktops and a data rack in every room filled with old Cisco gear to keep us warm.
Azure has its critics and for me having a sort of complete business cloud service probably only seems practical on a large scale. I then see consumers really not embracing the likes of Google Chrome OS, even lately Google announcing a reduction in focus on Chrome OS products and development. Probably because beyond cheap one's sold to broke US schools nobody really buys into that cloud ecosystem. Your locked in and for better or worse your dependent on a Azure or other cloud based service. I'm sure many would say no thanks.
There are several very big companies whose approach to data security is draconian, and considering how important their data is to them, quite rightly so. These are the sorts of companies who don't let their data anywhere near cloud servers.
They are also the sort of companies who can afford to drop enough money on linux development to make a linux desktop secure and sufficiently user friendly.
same as the old boss.
Here's your 3270, er, "pad." You can do whatever you want by connecting to our mainframe, er, "cloud." We'll send you a monthly bill for cpu time, er, "AaaS."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
or desktops
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
When I actually can get broadband that is better than the average speed in Belize. Which with Comcast will happen about a year after hell freezes over..
And I will certainly do so.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I dabble in Arduino programming, and the IDE doesn't lend itself to being turned into a web app. It could be, but developers are probably not going to accept that.
And devs are a tiny fraction of users. Right.
So delivering apps as web apps makes sens for, what, 60-80% of users? Good deal, 'virtualize' the desktop.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Try clouding/chromebooking/tableting CAD and Video production and you will get laughed out of the office. I use an iPad for bedtime web browsing, but my real work gets done on with a proper keyboard and mouse.
Windows as a service would have been widely available ten years ago if Microsoft hadn't thrown up licensing hurdles that made it pretty much impossible. This has never been an issue of whether anyone wants it or if it's possible, it has always been an issue of how Microsoft would charge for it. There's plenty of pent up demand and lots of sales will happen as soon as this becomes available. But, don't take that as a sign that everyone wants it or that the desktop market is dead.
Not even close. If nothing else, your IT professionals and your gaming crowd will want to retain control over the desktop environment. Not to mention that running most programs/applications on a cloud based system means you are beholden to your ISP for you to continue working -- whereas with desktop based applications you can continue to work WHEN, not IF, your internet access craps out.
Plus, latency in gaming would have to suck and I want to be able to play without needing an internet connection all the time. GOG and CD Projekt Red have proven that people still want to play on their desktop and without an always-on connection (and without DRM). There are other games and companies out there still filling this demand as well.
End of the desktop? Sure, as soon as Linux becomes the dominant desktop operating system. Oh, wait, not even then...
Yes, I haven't read TFA just the summary but comparing Stadia to Steam is not accurate at all: Stadia is a service for game streaming in Steam you buy the games digitally but you play them locally. They're just very different things.
OTOH since I use my PC for many things besides gaming I don't see myself using a "thin client" and running my apps on the cloud any time soon.
"Today, Google has shown with its Chrome OS that most of us can pretty much do anything we need to do on a computer with just a web browser." Uh no, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.
"If you want a "real" PC, your choices are going to be Linux or macOS." I think the author drank way too much Google and Microsoft Kool-Aid before writing this article. Or incurred some form of head trauma. Say the company you work at suddenly loses their internet connection when using these "web" services, no one can do any work. Sounds like a great plan Steven.
"Valve has been doing pretty well for years now with its Steam variation on this theme. "
You mean the BARELY usable for slow paced games Steam IN-HOME streaming? That product that REQUIRES you have a mid-range modern gaming PC mear meters away and requires proprietary third-party software to use any input device more exotic than a mouse, keyboard or gamepad?
THAT is your big "America is ready to give up the PC" evidence?
I'm sorry Journalists, for what i said about the future of bloggers back in 2000, please please please come back!
I know it wouldn't guarantee quality but they would at least be trained to check their facts...
At this point, hardware specs have well outpaced what is necessary to do most work. Even something like a phone or tablet is far superior to what would have been an impressive machine not so long ago. We're no longer counting every byte, processing, memory and storage are all plentiful even at low prices.
You need some sort of computer to access these services all the same, and it's pretty much a given that any such hardware can do the required work locally just fine, without the need to connect anywhere or pay anybody for a subscription.
You'd really have to to try really hard to buy something that would be only powerful enough to connect to a remote service and work as a display. In fact, the web has grown to require some quite impressive specs, and at this point it would be very hard to sell something you can't browse the web on comfortably, which means there's a lower bound to what can be sold reasonably.
It might make some sense for videogames, but the same problem exists there -- a cheap computer currently has a surprisingly decent integrated video card, which while it won't run Witcher 3 at 4K at 60 FPS, will do a quite passable job at low settings.
And of course such services always have issues with latency and bad connections.
Computing power is so cheap these days that it's easy to own a powerful desktop computer for not that much money.
Why should we rent computing power from someone else when the cost to buy it is trivial? And that's not even counting latency and bandwidth issues accessing your rented computer.
Really? When these monkeys will understand that you should not count on fast internet connection available 24/7? I really hope these dickheads would never, ever design airplanes!
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Oh you didn't get the memo? We're close to that too.
Strangely Chrome OS has gained more desktop features such as Android/Linux (in beta) app support and a better file manager recently. A plenty of Chrome extensions run locally. Also is the internet speed and server computing power enough to serve to billions of people?
Download caps and ISP's pushing there own cloud will really hurt this. Also just wait for some one to use there system and get an $25K roaming bill.
Desktops will continue for the foreseeable future.
I will say that PC sales have dropped considerably, but much of that is because there are few gains for gamers who play on 1080p screens, and for most of the rest, PCs have hit a performance level that is "good enough". There is little reason for most users to upgrade or replace, especially once they've swapped out hard drives for SSDs.
Enthusiasts have always been, and will continue to be, a marginal group; every year consoles gain ground.
VR may be the savior of the enthusiast upgrade cycle of years past (remember when we upgraded to new computers yearly?), but even those vendors are pushing standalone products.
Desktop are still better for gaming, multi-tasking, speed, and cost.
Laptop are close.
Phone are far off
And no cloud app will ever compare.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Sort of reminds me of Brazil, the movie, where everyone will just have a 'terminal' into some cloud.
None of us will have GP computing devices. Everything will be locked down, you'll be charged by the minute for using anything.
Not a good direction folks. Turn it around before you're locked in.
This forum is filled with niche uses. Yes, of course this won't work for CAD / video / specialized people. Most (non-slashdot) people are already weaned off computers and use phones / tablets for their personal use. If they use a computer at all it's at work where they neither know nor care how they get their desktop, how their apps or delivered, or where their data is stored.
It makes too much operational, security, and economic sense not to.
The desktop was always a stupid metaphor to sell computers to businessmen. Although an excusable one.
Actual computer users, as opposed to users of fixed-function appliances that happened to be implemented "on a computer" (cue patent jokes), always by definition needed a programmable open interface, and small modules to glue together with them.
Even professionals who were forced onto desktop systems, made their own programming environments.
Businesses made their spreadsheeds (a form of functional programming), and 3D designers/engineers had full customizable software (like Maya) with easy scriptability.
The iDiot generation was the first who had never encountered that side of things before. And they want to be at the helm of cultural development now. Precisely becuase they are so oblivious to literally all the things. So they of course declared everything not like iOS nor for consumers outdated and useless.
But anyone who wants to actually *make* anything at all with computers, *will* sooner or later long for programmability. Even if never before seen.
So Linux, the OS of actual computer users, is so successful, precisely because it's not a desktop OS.
It's nothing new. We got away from it because it was expensive to run the RDP and web apps did most of what we needed (with the occasional terminal emulator for mainframe stuff).
This is just Microsoft hoping to sell Windows as a "Service" so I can pay $300/yr per employee for Windows.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That's not true, which is why Google has been trying to make ChromeOS more attractive by adding support for GNU/Linux and Android applications.
The bare minimum Chromebook was suitable for some uses, but very few people bought it to use as their primary computing environment. The fact Google is putting an enormous amount of work into making it a full desktop tells you that the basis of the article is... dubious.
Oh sure, Microsoft sees managed desktops as a thing, but I'd suggest the intended market are businesses, and even then most are going to balk at the concept of something that ceases to work if their extremely high bandwidth Internet connection goes down.
The Google streaming games thing also doesn't really factor into this... at all. That's something likely to replace consoles, not PCs. If consoles didn't kill PCs, why would Google's streaming efforts do that?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Wasn't the desktop supposed to be dying 15 years ago, when tablets first started coming out?
We have cars. We have SUV's. We have minivans. We have trucks. We have motorcycles. No single one of them is in danger of extinction, although sales vary between the groups from year to year. The desktop is also here to stay. Only a desktop can provide the raw computing power, the flexibility, the ease of modification and programming. Try to switch the graphics card on your tablet. Try to program your console.
Now we can argue that not everyone needs or wants a desktop - I agree. But dead? Never.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Completely usable systems for less than $50
Just why do I care about Microsoft ?
Any type of real work (i.e. "creation work") requires a desktop. Even accounting, writing, graphic design, documentation, and of course, programming. Touch-screen devices just aren't meant to be used that way. The mouse and keyboard are mandatory, as is the high resolution monitor.
"I don't do any actual work so I see no need for desktop computers."
Eventually, "friendly" became the most important adverb in computing circles, and we've reached the point in user-friendliness that people don't even talk about it anymore.
What moron wrote this? How clueless do you have to be to believe such a thing? No wonder they believe the end of the desktop is a realistic possibility.
If all goes well, you'll be able to subscribe to Windows Virtual Desktop this fall
If all goes well for Microsoft. This will be a disaster for customers.
You rent yourself out as a user of various products. This program is really long over due. i.e. had people been doing this with the amount of wasted time spent in dealing with Microsoft while in current times of collecting your data for AI training, we'd all be wealthy as we'd all get return value for our contribution to advancing tech. Whats the program called? Anti-Catch Twenty-Two Entrapment Rental. "ACTTER" Or would this bankrupt tech?
So remember to always update so you can continue to be competitive... under the tech created and tech's self supporting environment. For they own all your competitive base and we can't afford to have all our competitive base go bankrupt.
... at home, that can be accessed from his PC or via VPN from his AOSP-based phone or his laptop.
And so do our relatives and friends.
This is Slashdot after all.
It's not like it's hard or expensive, to buy a Raspberry-Pi-like system, stick it on the ethernet, and connect a USB disk to it.
Get a static IP, a domain from freedns.afraid.org (please donate), and install a mail server.
On Gentoo, there is a guide that includes spam filtering that is superior to Google's, and even includes greylisting!
I bet there's ready-made images out there.
This is the entire end game of the corporations. Complete lockin and rental. Unbreakable DRM and monitoring. This is the future. Eventually they won't allow you to even connect to the Internet without a "virtual desktop"
Wow, so we've now come full circle and Microsoft is "inventing" thin-client computing all over again?
As usual, Microsoft is just ripping off 25 year old technology and calling it new.
"If you want a "real" PC, your choices are going to be Linux or macOS."
This guy will never get it.
When did "friendly" become an adverb? That IS news for nerds!
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
Categorize all stories like this as "trolling"? They seem to pop up every 6 months or less and tout the same thing. The demise, the demise. *eyeroll*
A slow, steady decline of PC sales doesn't indicate the demise. Just ban these stories as there's no purpose to them other than to rip the editors for allowing it.
The ambient intelligence concept was formalized 30 years ago with visions of it dating back to the 60's. Loosing more and more of our privacy due to the pervasiveness of technology in our daily life (facebook, google etc.) is a good indicator that we're following this vision quite by the book. Ironically one of the reasons why ambient intelligence got bashed as a concept in the past is loss of privacy and control. It seems we're doing it anyways and getting less and less control of the IT we're consuming and using every day (desktop going cloud) is a good indicator that we're right on track.
I wonder if there's a deep relation between the (delusional) thinking that property isn't something a lot of us want (or even need) and the socialists invading our government. I've been using Microsoft Excel since it was available with a shell called "Windows" to be used on MS-DOS machines. The day that MS requires me to use a subscription instead of a copy I possess (licensed) is the day I switch to another spreadsheet. I refuse to have my spreadsheet dependent on my internet connection. I refuse to buy a spreadsheet that limits its use by requiring a subscription. I'm just that kind of guy.
Application streaming will fail outside of niche urban markets (chiefly well-heeled enterprise customers) for one simple reason: Americans do not have adequate internet service, and we won't be getting it any time soon. Latency, data caps, unreliable service, high prices for anything even remotely good, the works. Even in the inner cities service outages are common enough to be a dealbreaker for anything but trivial services like entertainment, unless you're willing to pay out the nose for actual First World internet service. 5G isn't going to fix this, because we'll just be throwing good technology after bad infrastructure. Not promising in the least.
That being said, between security concerns, the declining reliability of cellular service and portable devices alike, and the obvious dangers of bait-and-switch price hikes happening once real personal computers become a super-premium luxury item, I think the case for real personal computers makes itself. Sadly, nobody's going to hear that case until after the glaring, obvious pitfalls of the cloud and its business model make themselves known. Expect a dark time to appear, where every major software and hardware vendor tries really, really hard to take us back to the bad old days of mainframe computing and charge-by-the-minute service for a few years or so. When consumers ultimately can't or won't pay the toll, cheap mini-computers (most likely in the form of dockable portable devices) will make a comeback. The desktop has been very hard to kill for a reason, even though it's been technically possible for over a decade at least to do so.
The end of desktop computing is a fantasy, but latency, service interruptions, and information security threats are real. The future won't be all that different from how it is today.
I've been working in the software world, at Microsoft as a contractor in the 90s and several other large companies and these kinds of predictions as I look back are almost always wrong. I remember very clearly, many times, people predicting - "we won't have PCs! It will all be terminal based!" or some other various of the same. The truth? Computers are like rabbits, they are breeding. I have a phone (which is also a computer running an operating system) in my pocket, and several different kinds of computers in my life. Cloud services, for very low latency apps, are still problematic. So let's say I'm starting Photoshop, which I do often. Where is it stored? Locally? Locally on what? Or? Where does the processing for my giant image take place? So when I save an image that's 500 megabytes, it's going to be saved ... over TCP/IP? And that super low latency, super high bandwidth stuff is going to be ubiquitous enough by 2025? I don't think so.
I especially love it when people make timeline predictions. Those are the best to look at an say, "THAT'S when they thought THAT STUFF would happen? That's hilarious!" Predicting things like this is almost like prophets of old predicting the end of the World. I'm not sure why people even try to do it.
At several times in the past Linux on the desktop was going to be the next big thing.
Cloud based games would let a million nerds finally drop the last thing that was keeping them on Windows. Sure the hipsters tell you the all modern AAA games are trash but the fact is Wine still isn't fully up to it and those games are the only thing keeping many, many people from switching.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
If and when this happens, the hardware will also start to change to this model. Nvidia and AMD might stop making 3D cards for what's left of the desktop and just concentrate on making "cloud server" cards. Where would that leave Linux & MacOS? Would those users be forced to use increasingly older hardware?
Reminds me of when I was working for a company in the early 00s that wanted to phase out all desktops and move to thin clients without hard drives that served up a Citrix desktop. We got through only about 2 departments before it was determined to be an idiotic errand. Our Citrix farm had ballooned from less than 10 4-way beasts to almost 40 and counting, and users were pissed that they had slow server connections, lost work, etc. trying to work this way. We ended up pulling most of the thin clients out and going back to traditional HDD desk/laptops. The news of the desktop's death has been greatly exaggerated.
No way would that work for the company I am at. I guess there is a niche spot for them, but it's going to cost. You still have to have hardware on the other side to run the stuff... why not get a real computer?
Imagine the frustration when the net goes down and your PC is suddenly a useless lump. With all this interconnected stuff can you even entertain yourself if the net is down? During hurricane season the loss of electricity for two weeks or so is all too common. But if you have a generator you can read your ebooks, play chess etc.. Excessive complexity is not your friend.
Also considering to install Igel on the clients.
Let me be clear we're still trying to manage that Awingu thing conveniently because it's not exactly managed with templating like Citrix.
We have to because of funny security standards in contracts with clients.
People have been proclaiming the desktop "dead" for a couple decades now.
It hasn't happened.
Certain niches that were originally filled by desktop PCs have adjusted for things like laptops, tablets, phones, etc.
Additionally you saw the rise of web-based services where you didn't NEED to keep everything on a hefty central machine.
So you saw market correction.
That's all we're seeing here.
The desktop PC is going nowhere.
The install base may continue to shrink as more targeted solutions claim niches. But desktops are not going to die.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I don't see that ever happening.
Corporatism != Free Market
You are dumb.
Assuming the failure of Net Neutrality doesn't cripple all of the gaming as a service options out their I still don't see GAAS quickly overtaking PC.
The US has really poor high latency connections to a high percentage of homes.
Ask the PC game modding community PC / Linux in 2019 and you will see it is dominated by Windows PC.
The casual gaming market will start adopting the features offered by GAAS, but there are limitations that will slow the mass adoption of true gamers for a number of years still.
Windows will not be gone by 2025.
Windows Virtual Desktop is not going to be as popular as envisioned.
What market share is this going to overtake? The Citrix XenDesktop and VMware Horizons remote workstations of business?
Why are they going to switch? Licensing costs?
Certainly not because of ease of manageability to domain resources.
I don't think the author really understands the intricacies of enterprise environments and the gaming world.
Yeahhhhhhh and in 2025 we will all have self driving quadrocopter cars too.
okay dumbass.
Everyone will be a consumer, and no one will develop. There is no need for programmers any more.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In the IT world everything changes so often, we expect it. So articles like "death o major technology X is imminent!" are believable, not laughable. This isn't true elsewhere in the world. Nobody would seriously take an article entitled "The end of wheat is near!", despite what the weird anti-gluten people all think.
But yet we keep hearing this nonsense about how Major Technology XYZ is about to go the way of the dodo. Insert Java, C, SQL, and today The Deskop into the sentence. It's not as if this is new. I've heard that the desktop is over for at least the last 10 years. What a lot of people don't understand is that certain things are so entrenched, it'll take multiple decades, if ever for them to go away. We still have a lot of freaking COBOL code in the world, despite pretty much everyone wanting to get rid of it.
Personally I've never had a work laptop, and I don't want one. I have a personal laptop, but I haven't had a personal desktop for about 10 years. I did build a desktop for my wife to do some photo editing a few months ago. She loves it, and a laptop just wouldn't suit her for what she does.
It all points to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/office-365-platform-service-description/office-365-securitycompliance-center
which is your company computer will be all cloud hosted, locked down and you will not have any local files. Your data, email, phone, skyupe conversations, etc will be in the cloud scanned, shake and baked by your company's governance org.
So a remote user with access level high enough can scan your entire company's data for threat tracking or any other purpose.
...and wecalled it, a âoeterminal-mainframeâ architecture, only it used a wired rather than a radio connection. And then the desktop came along. Enjoy your âoecloudâ toys, fellas, Iâ(TM)m having myself a lemonade while waiting for the âoenext big thingâ to be called out on ./ ;)
This article comes out every year....
My previous employer used that setup for years. End users except for IT all logged into a virtual desktop hosted on a Citrix server which was run on a VMWare instance.
A 'cloud within a cloud'. Big whoop..
Seems like everyone keeps forgetting the well known distributed computing fallacy - "the network is reliable". This is a big part of why the PC was a success in the first place - it has fairly minimal requirements to perform basic work that don't include things like "some router at the ISP" or "that local wifi access point". Gamers have taken this message to heart with the pushback against "always on" titles that quickly run into server capacity issues, businesses learn it as well when their workforce it taken offline in the middle of the day...
Virtual desktops are simply a different tradeoff, not fundamentally better than local workstations...
Yeah, because user friendliness came (sort of) and then went again! I'd say true user friendliness peaked in the early 2000's and has been in slow decline ever since. Now it's constant churn as user interfaces are redone to use the latest whiz-bang controls the kids have come up with, with absolutely no testing to see if they're really faster or more intuitive for users. But it's not about usability, consistency, etc.; it's all about keeping the younger developers from getting bored at their jobs...sigh...
And mine needs repairing. Guess I wouldn't have had that problem with cloud storage.
I doubt I'm alone in having my work and files all on my own desktop or laptop.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I don't want all my files on someone else's server, where their admins can peruse it at their leisure, combing through it with bots for meta data, and targeting ads and updates based on what they find, or worse: Police arriving at my door because a pop-up sent me to a Bad Site, and now there's a trail linking me to something completely unintentional.
Nope.
Hard Nope.
At that point, I will move fully into Linux territory, and they can just go broke not getting my money, data or attention.
No, not every ass-hat is buying a new PC. The speed/power curve on those devices flattened out so there isn't much need.
Even if the speed/power curve has flattened out, rechargeable lithium ion batteries wear out, and replacement rechargeable batteries for a given model stop being manufactured. Screens break, keyboards break, occasionally GPUs overheat, etc. So there'd still be a market for PCs to replace broken PCs. The troublesome part comes when the market for replacing broken PCs is by itself not big enough to sustain economies of scale to continue making a wide range of PCs at home office prices. This already happened to entry-level compact laptops in fourth quarter 2012, for example.
On top of that mom and dad aren't buying junior a PC any longer. They buy a tablet because, gee whiz, it's cheaper (because the damned things are toasters).
Until the high school "introduction to computer science" class that junior is taking gets to a point where a tablet running a smartphone OS is no longer enough to support coursework.
where a tablet does replace a PC or a laptop, its just until that person runs into a situation where they need to use a real application and not Twitter to the their friends or play stupid games.
The fear is that when someone runs into such a situation, they may find it hard to resolve it. Affordable laptops smaller than 11.6" have become hard to find. Parents might not be able to afford a laptop on a week's notice, and they might end up unwilling to buy one at all were it not school-related.
.....hahahaha, good one.
April fools was on Monday.
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Nobody wants a laggy game, and games are now going sub 6ms to offer a 165Hz experience. There's also the fact that great codecs like AV1 are not the norm on all devices, and that we don't have edge/points of presence for game streaming.
Not to mention that the studios may or may not be happy selling a game through a subscription model if it hits the shelves. I've already tried this cloud gaming before but settled on a good PC / Desktop for the next 4-5 years.
More power to the cloud gamers, but I don't think it's solvable in the next few years unless the internet infrastructure to deliver games really catches up.
But I do know how I use Steam and why. The "why" is simple: it's just an online ressource for games that I bought and sometimes play. In the past I held those bought games in bookshelfs physically at my home - the advantage was that I could install them at any time (again) from physical media. But with those pesky bug fixes coming along since the 90ies long after I bought them buggy for the shelf, this "advantage" has long dwindled down. If you have to download gigs of bug fixes after a new install it's simply not worth it to have a "base" version on the bookshelf.
The "how I use" is even more simple. For sure there are plenty of Steam users that prefer online gaming against other users. I for one (and there are surely many like me) avoid online gaming. I download a fresh installment of a game (mostly old ones), play it as single user in "offline mode" on my Desktop and deinstall when I'm through with it (which may often be after the first half of a game). Then I download something other when I feel the need. This is for practical reasons just the same as 20 years ago - just with no physical media from the bookshelf.
One could argue, that from one moment to the next Steam could vanish/go bancrupt/whatever and all those games at Steam (that I bought) are lost. There's a point to that like everything else in the "cloud". But for those minor sums of gaming costs (per game) it just isn't worth to think about it. There'd be just anyone else that will sell me downloadable games after that hypothetical Steam loss and those "mainstream" oldies that I play will be on offer there.
Windows 7 replaceement with Linux scheduled for 2020 anyway. These microsoft stories will become a thing of the past.
Yeah, and after we hit this kind of market people will start predicting the end of the virtual desktop. We've been here before, and we'll be here again, with markets shifting around based off how people are currently using technology and where data centres are in their lifecycle.
They want to move people to virtual desktops.... but you still need a device to connect to said virtual desktop.
What are they going to do, push manufacturers to start selling dumb terminals like people used to use in the 80s?
Cause that's basically what all this is. A return to the old mainframe style interaction, just at a larger scale, and with far greater consequences when Microsoft inevitably fucks up their security.
...my house has three Macs and a bunch of Linux boxes (all of which are used for real, paid work), but no Windows.
we all have zero ping, no interruption, fibre connections, this take off in no time!
This millennial household replaced one of our cars with Uber to good effect, but we still have more desktops than people in the house.
Back in the 90's some clown was trying to convince me that desktops were obsolete and that everybody would get WebTV's.
Here we go again.
A: You don't.
Fix customers in place by way of collective enterprise licencing.
Or make it easy for them to buy a computer and have the OS pre-installed -- after you stronghand h/w makers into "offering" your product.
Or make it even easier by forcing them to eat what they want at your restaurant: ready for the "Linux desktop"? Because they already do "Linux servers" or so I've heard. Next time, you'll think you're using a cloud Linux desktop... at *their* cloud. And they'll be super happy in pocketing your money. Better not close your eyes, you might miss your money teleporting away.
Methinks this is a post from Monday :)
The first true generation of the WinTel monopoly was Windows 3.11 on a 386/486/first gen of Pentiums. Even before Windows 95 came out there were people who had a computer installed booting directly into Windows 3.11. If it ever ended up in an error condition where it started in DOS, they were completely lost. Windows 95 to ME made this worse, and the Windows XP generation cemented it for good, giving almost 10 years of common operating system expectations before Windows 7/10 ruined it (Really, nobody who had a choice used Vista unless they wanted eyecandy, or GFW support.)
Having said that, that mindset of people are now the sole market force for 98 percent of computing, and as a result the companies catering to us little guys simply don't have the pull to get the documentation or hardware design necessary to produce full featured systems for us like back in the 1980s-1990s.
Desktop is a form factor alongside laptop and mobile. Form factor is largely independent of operating system as there are Linux desktops, Windows laptops, and Macos desktops.
There's no operational necessity to save locally-edited documents on Someone Else's Computer(tm)
Say you want to start working on a document on one of your computers and finish on another of your computers. These computers aren't always on the same LAN and turned on at the same time, and at least one of them doesn't even have a USB A port with which to connect a flash drive. (A 5" pocket computer usually won't.) Nor is it always practical to forward a port to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ in your home now that ISPs are putting entire neighborhoods behind a single NAT IPv4 address. So you end up bouncing the files off someone else's computer, be it a storage account that you lease, an email account that you lease, or a VPS that you lease.
As fas as I can see from here, the tablet fad is dead. People just use smartphones of ther preferred size, or e-book readers, or laptops.
Hell, even Steve Jobs never announced the death of the PC. It may be the "Post PC" era, but he never said they were going to die.
After Windows 8 came out in fourth quarter 2012, entry-level 10.1" x86-64 laptops disappeared in favor of (higher profit margin) convertibles and detachables as well as locked-down Windows RT devices. When netbooks came back, largely as a response to Chromebook late in Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign, the smallest one could buy was 11.6".
He likened the PC to trucks - versatile machines that can do everything, but have limitations of their own, while smartphones and tablets represent other vehicles on the road - able to do their tasks generally with far more efficiency. But as you can see, we have trucks on the road still, because of their utility.
But can someone who doesn't own a truck but occasionally needs to use one rent a truck? Can someone who occasionally needs a PC rent a PC?
Is there a substantial wheel tax penalty for owning a truck compared to a car? Is something analogous contemplated for owning a PC?
The proof is in the pudding! Who hosts their own servers today? Nobody, that's who.
That's more an issue of ISP policy: how the subscriber's downstream to upstream is configured, who gets a routable IP address as opposed to a line in the NAT table, who gets to regularly take incoming connections without risking disconnection for acceptable use policy violation, etc.
Also, I still want to be able to use my computers OFFLINE.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This guy peddles more speculation and nonsense than most opinion writers. Get this trash out of here.
Anyone who thinks I am going to hand over control of my computer experience to Microsoft is living in cloud cuckoo land.
The desktop PC is going nowhere.
The install base may continue to shrink as more targeted solutions claim niches. But desktops are not going to die.
Even if the desktop PC doesn't die, the laptop PC might. In fourth quarter 2012, the install base of 10.1" laptops shrank enough that manufacturers stopped making 10.1" laptops. This disappointed those few people for whom a 10.1" laptop was optimal, such as myself at the time. People whose 10.1" laptop broke (or whose original battery and replacement battery could no longer hold a charge) had to settle for buying an 11.6" laptop and the slightly bigger, more conspicuous bag that it requires. The closer you get to a traditional laptop case, the more attractive it appears to would-be thieves.
And even if the desktop PC doesn't die, it may become expensive enough that only established companies, not home users, can afford one. This would make it more expensive to start a home-based business.
Welcome back to the mainframe era!
Dumb Terminal Rental, 4.99/Mo
Disk Space Rental 0.99/Mo/Gb
Backup Service 1.99/Mo/Gb
CPU Rental: $0.15Hr/Cpu/Ghz
Network Access Fee: 5.99/Mo
System Access Fee: 5.99/Mo
Fee Payment Fee: 1.99/Mo
Fee Payment Fee Recovery Fee: 0.99/Mo
Fee Payment Fee Recovery Fee Levy: 0.75/Mo
Fee Payment Fee Recovery Fee Levy Premium: 0.99/Mo
Regulatory Fee: 1.99/Mo
Facebook Fee: 0.25/Mo
Google Fee: 10.00/Mo
Bing Fee: FREE!
Email Fee: FREE with Hotmail
Skype Fee: 2.99/Mo
Microsoft Office Fee: 14.99/Mo - With Additional Free Storage - Backup Extra!
Bandwidth Fee: 0.25/Gb/Mo
But don't worry! There will be value-saving "bundles" where you can purchase everything you need, all for a small monthly fee.
For instance, everything you are used to doing now, could cost as little as 100.00/Mo + internet fees + router rental fees + government fees!
Look, you already own nothing of value:
you rent your phone
you lease your car
most people are renters
most people would be happy if they could rent the clothes on their backs, for a small monthly fee!
ownership is bad, it keeps you tied down. Renting is good! it keeps you mobile!
For Citrix specifically, I found a recurring issue. Citrix is sold as a system to "reduce costs" and "control complexity". These are the Citrix value propositions.
What this results in, in the wild, are Citrix desktop environments that are barebones and hardly functional. I have used a lot of Citrix systems in my time and only one (!) didn't disappoint me. It had a wide array of programs and functions, it was well-designed, and it didn't suck. Every other Citrix deployment sucked. Every. Single. One.
Oh, you say, that's merely a problem of the Citrix Admins, and management. It's personnel and not technology! No, Citrix was sold as reducing costs, so management is determined to get their value. Which means the Citrix Admins are either not trained properly, or there are too few of them, or they don't care, or the entire concept of supporting users is an afterthought.
The other problem with Citrix is, everyone assumes the technology works as advertised. Now, I'm not saying that Citrix doesn't work at all, that would be nuts. No, I'm saying that Citrix introduces another failure point into your technology stack, and the tech does indeed fail from time to time. The net result is, for every problem that Citrix solves, it seems to introduce a new problem. You haven't really advanced in terms of overall value.
Where are the Citrix implementations where the users come first? There aren't any. If you don't believe this, ask yourself how many users requested Citrix in the first place, as a tech layer. It's never users who introduce Citrix, it is always someone else who does so.
User mods are a BAD thing if you're doing competitive play!
If all players in a friend match are playing with the same set of mods, I don't see how they're a bad thing. Even in stranger matches, I don't see how an accessibility mod, such as one that remaps buttons, increases text size, or makes colors more color-blind friendly, gives an unfair advantage.
This is already the case. I work for a half-billion USD company in the Mid-Atlantic and we are totally dependent on our internet connection. If it, or any of the services we use it for, goes down, we are dead-in-the-water. Somewhat surprisingly, Salesfarce has been extremely reliable. Only one brief outage that I can remember in the last four years. Internet connection has not suffered any downtime in that same period, and geographically we are not really in a hotbed area for tech firms.
So, meh.
People assume that the reason for fewer desktop sales is that people aren't using them. Perhaps they're just using the ones that they have longer. I have a couple of PCs that are significantly older than 5 years old that still do an adequate job. I don't necessarily need to buy a replacement any time soon for some of the reasons I have them. If I was writing with one, for instance, I could use anything from the last 30 years for that purpose. (George R.R. Martin still uses DOS and he's doing OK.)
Lack of meaningful innovation is what's stifling PC sales. Give me something I need and I'll upgrade, otherwise I'll save my money and kick the can down the road another year.
The Microsoft monopoly wasn't entirely based on the Windows OS. We can see that with the great transition to Cloud Computing. In early 2014 Microsoft didn't make it into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Computing. By April of 2014 though, with a new CEO having released Office 365 for iOS, with Android soon to follow, the Microsoft Cloud came into its own.
Now, in April of 2019, this mornings recommendation from Motley Fool was to bet on the Microsoft Cloud beating Amazon's AWS. Notice, Motley has no one in third place "). At a $22 Billion annual run rate, largely subscription based, Microsoft's leap from the desktop to the Cloud is nothing short of spectacular.
But it makes sense.
The Windows monopoly had a crushing grip on Office business systems. Between the years of 1992 and 1998, Microsoft managed to dominate upwards of 98% of all business automation systems. Windows OS and Microsoft Office led an array of productivity apps into such dominance that you could easily say that Windows was the "client" in client/server computing.
For years the experts have argued over the cornerstone of the Microsoft monopoly. I kind of think that the success of the Microsoft Cloud pretty much puts the finger on MS Office based applications. In fact, I would go so far as to say that businesses were reluctant to move their business automation to the Cloud until that moment when Microsoft made it possible for them to take their Office productivity and workflow documents with them. What good is cloud computing if you can't take your workflow information with you? We are talking billions of documents here.
Consider then that the cornerstone of the great monopoly might well have been that of "application-bound information". The OS provides both a hardware reference platform and, and application platform. Windows OS didn't move to the Cloud (or has not yet moved :). It was Office 365 that broke things open for Microsoft. The application-bound documents that fuel so many workflows and productivity systems would, with Office 365, be able to take advantage of a still emerging high mobility,multi-device, Cloud Computing world.
Billions of business documents and automated processes are now moving to the Cloud, BUT are still application-bound!
Interestingly Microsoft was part of the Corporate coalition developing Web Assembly technology. Which kind of shouts out that they are ready to kiss their beloved OS good-bye anyway.
WASM works. Spectacularly so. You can see it in action at http://NativeDocuments.com, where over a million lines of C, C++ code is running inside a browser.
The WASM technology puts the browser into direct contention with any and all OS's. More importantly, though, is there anything as ubiquitous as a browser?
The ubiquitous market share of the Windows OS was a key contributor to the monopoly and subsequent market share of MS Office. From there, the MS Office iron grip on business documents, the real monopoly, ensures that the Microsoft Cloud would dominate business. As long as Microsoft can keep application control over thes billions of past, current and future productivity documents, I think they can succeed in making WASM work for them. And do so without the high cost trying to keep Windows OS competitive. Maybe they kissed that dream good-bye too. And maybe this is a good way to clear out the Windows ecosystem of application providers and sign them on for an even more profitable round of Microsoft Cloud development?
One last thought. The Internet has always been a platform where communications, computational content, and collaboration COULD be integrated. (Thank you, Steve Jobs, for providing that final piece; a device capable of this much-needed integration.). Information is the coin of the Internet "communications-content-collaboration" realm. For business automation, there are two kinds of information that matter: Data and Documents.
Oracle apps dominated data information in the client/server era. M
That could well be the future, but not a future in which I want to participate. Situated upon my desk at the moment are four computers, not counting my cell-phone: a notebook running Linux Mint 19, another running Windows 10, another running Windows 7, and the fourth running Android's latest version. Each device is dedicated to one or two or three purposes. The one I'm using most frequently is the Linux Mint laptop, but the others grab info for me automagically:, and I bounce from keyboard to keyboard to see from youwhat's up. I'm what you'd call eclectic in civilised company, but prefer the term "intellectual slut" -- I don't much care whether the research is about what's happening to the icebergs in Iceland and Antarctica, or the fossils recently found in Australia, or the obsolescence of graphens. I love all of it.
I know I could run all these OSs as VMs but that would slow everything down, and that is not my way.
One final comment. For all practical purposes, my laptops may as well be desktops, since a) I seldom move them, and b) they are much smaller and I like that: Small is Beautiful.
And yet, and yet, I retain my love for my HP Millennium Tower, the most trustworthy machine I have ever purchased, and I'm going to do my best to preserve her forever.
Cloud based games need to not become cable 2.0 with all of the big AAA games has part of the starting at $60/mo base package