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.

Comments

Soon

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also the year of the Linux desktop!

Re:Soon

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a Linux desktop for two decades now.

Re:Soon

[omnichad]

It might be time to upgrade.

259 million PCs sold last year

[JoeyRox]

Granted sales have been declining steadily but we're about as close to the end of the desktop as we are to End times.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Christ on a crutch. You might as well ask how many oranges were sold to eskimos living in the Sahara.

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. 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).

Yes, PC sales are not as strong as the once were and tablet sales are increasing, but there is overlap between the two groups of users, and 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.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[JoeyRox]

Ok, now how many tablets and smartphones were sold last year and to whom? The number of PCs sold by itself doesn't mean anything. Those could mostly be business computers, not personal computers, which is where the numbers are.

259 million PCs sold doesn't mean anything? Why is that? And how is the mix between business and personal use material? This article talks about the desktop losing to alternatives such as Windows Virtual Desktop, a product targeted to business users.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[JMJimmy]

I for one am looking to return to desktop computing. I am sick of trying to wrangle all my devices and info and having to wait on slow as sin mobile.

I want a single powerful/fast desktop that can handle the workload for my household, sit off in a corner out of sight, and everything else to be a screen for it to be delivered to. No one wants to deliver this to the end user though because it means they're only buying 1 expensive system instead of multiple. I for one can't afford the latter option and don't want the headaches that come with it.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Etcetera]

The main problem however stands: People are more willing to pay a one time fee to own something than to add another line to a bill. This is simply a sociological and psychological phenomena, more so when Cloud Service adds ISP shenanigans into the mix which everyone is already pissed enough about because that adds another variable to a monthly bill which is also an unstable variable that the user has no control over.

This is all well and good for our generation, but in case you haven't noticed, later-day Millennials and most of Gen-Z are growing up without an ownership mindset. However much this is due to economics and however much is a self-fulfilling prophecy for making the best of a bad economy is debatable, but the fact remains that the trend is *away* from ownership and *toward* services and this will continue until interrupted (no pun intended).

Urban millennials are convincing themselves that Ubering around is better than owning a car, that subscription music services are better than buying purchase rights (let alone buying a CD), Blu-ray collections are composed of only the best-of-the-absolutely-best favorites, and "experiences" like avocado toast flights are still being pushed intra-generationally above things like investing and home ownership.

This is a not a culture that sees any need for a desktop. For most, there's no need for anything more than a Chromebook, and for a great many their needs can be met by a tablet or reliable phablet/smartphone.

Programmers and hackers in the traditional sense are a rounding error (and frankly, many young programmers today have a cloud-only mindset too). Creatives might need processing power, but they really don't... they just need good bandwidth to where the processing power is.

What killed the desktop form factor? Wi-Fi.
What killed desktop *operating systems*? 4G.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[BringsApples]

If Microsoft wants to stop selling operating systems, and stop updating operating systems, but you've built your whole company's business model around using MS products, what will you do?

And don't forget to consider the fact that once MS no longer cares about the desktop, and they're no longer selling any, then it can begin finger-pointing along the lines of:
"All hacking today is done on locally used platforms, not our Azure services - we can prove it." ...and laws begin to form around the same concept.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Ol Olsoc]

Like it or not, the PC is fading. Yes, there's always going to be use-case scenarios, but a helluva lot of consumer computing these days is happening on portable devices and consoles.

Sure. The regular folks are on tablets and smartphones. They only consume, and don't produce anything but Facebook posts.

But the "end". Not hardly. Just user shift. The regular folks don't need what a Desktop can do. The professional user can hardly work without one. I use 27 inch screens at a minimum, and my latest worker computer is a 27 inch plus a 42 inch screen. Now my iPhone has iMovie on it, but I'm in no hurry to use it. Muh fingers are too big.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Anne Thwacks]

On top of that mom and dad aren't buying junior a PC any longer.

Cos he's got two already!

Its not like the new ones are better. Maybe new servers are better than old ones, but now home PCs are mostly crap. A quick trip to PC Wold revealed that most of their offerings are actually worse than my seven year old laptop in every respect. They don't even have DVD drives. No wonder they are not selling them.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[MightyMartian]

My smartphone has been my salvation on more than one occasion when routers or servers have gone down. It's damned useful to have an independent device I can go on the Internet and find solutions. Yes, I could do the same with a laptop, but then I'd still have to tether to my phone, so it's a helluva lot simpler just to bring up the browser on my phone.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[thereddaikon]

The PC isn't fading. Its MATURE. The tech sector has never dealt with product maturity well. I think its because the silicon valley mindset pushes the notion of constant improvements. Until recently PC's have seen year over year obvious feature and performance improvements. Back in the 90's it was common to say your computer was obsolete before you got it out of the box and that was certainly true. But today you can do just fine on a computer over 5 years old depending on your workload. My primary personal laptop is a ThinkPad x230. My work laptop is a new T480 and honestly the T480 isn't all that better.Standard office work, media consumption and casual gaming can all be done on systems that a decade ago would have been tossed in the trash. The overall PC market is shrinking some, coming off of the 30 odd year growth high its had but the niches where there is never enough performance continue to see growth. Gaming PC's, media content creation, programming, scientific uses etc are all doing fine and very profitable. It just so happens to be that 90% of PC users dont fall into those categories. They check their email, watch Netflix and use Turbotax once a year. You can do that on a mid range i5 several generations old no problem.

PC's have also been pushed out of some markets where there is better suited form factors. Smartphone, tablets, chromebooks etc are common but the analysts said all of those would dethrone the PC. None of them have, tablets have actually started to take a downturn as smartphones have morphed to fill both roles. And even the phones have just about reached maturity. They definitely have reached saturation.

This is the natural evolution of markets. Eventually you get to a point where major product improvements become less common and you simply have refinement. It happened to cars, at some point in the 80's or 90's normal cars got about as good as they are today in terms of safety, reliability and performance. They didn't stop improving but a mid 90's Camry is still perfectly fine. It's reliable, its safe and it gets decent economy. A 2019 Camry is better still, but not so much that I would just toss the older one if it was still in good working order. The same couldn't be said comparing a 70's sedan to a 90's one though. Its unlikely a 70's car would have even made it into the 90's unless an unreasonable amount of money had been spent on it or if it had some collector value that makes it worthwhile.

One thing that has changed is that as technology improves it seems that it takes less and less time for a product to move from its growth stage to maturity. Cars took the better part of a century to get there. The personal computer took about 30 years. Smartphones have done it in a decade. The next cool consumer product will probably go from hot new thing to perfected in around 5 years. Again, maturity doesn't mean people stop buying it or that it doesn't get better. What it does mean is that for most consumers its "good enough". Aside from niche use cases year over year improvements become minor and the majority of sales are based on replacing attrition due to damage, failure, loss or theft. Niche an high end subsets like luxury cars, gaming PC's and $1k smartphones are broadly immune to this. But the demographics who buy into them are either dedicated enough or rich enough to be able to commit to replacing their hardware often.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[postbigbang]

There's another point, unmentioned, but related. Where do you compute, and can you trust the cloud, philosophically?

Microcomputing became popular in the late 1970s and early 80s because time-share systems and mini/mainframes were centrist in philosophy. Distributed thinking, even autonomous thinking spawned great software, and let to lots of hardware development, not to mention industrial computing.

You can't do this if you're totally in the cloud. Edge devices start to deteriorate from entropy-- the same old stuff, just vaguely prettier screens. You can't plug in USB to many clouds, and if you can, the ability for diverse devices (drivers, configurations, etc) simply are not available. Everyone gets the same cloud with different lipstick.

I don't want 100% of my stuff in Microsoft's cloud, where it'll spill-out, get deleted, become unavailable, get fed through someone's AI analyzer for fun and profit, etc. I don't trust Microsoft any farther than I can throw them-- their financial interests are to their shareholders, not me-- just like the social media tyrants and the surveillance governments. Paranoid? Maybe, but look at how staggering the leaks are, then think again.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[serviscope_minor]

How hard is it to tether to your phone??

For more it's a swipe and a press top enable a hotspot, then my laptop just connects. Much more convenient to use a desktop browser than a phone.

Re:259 million PCs sold last year

[Bert64]

X11 is capable of everything you describe and has been for many years, for instance opengl support in x11 offloads the rendering to the client device in the same way directx does and has been doing so for much longer.

The problem is that these features of X11 get ignored and neglected. Modern applications and ui frameworks are doing things which either break network transparency or make it extremely slow, and features like remote glx got ignored for so long that the code broke and got removed.

I used to use an SGI workstation as a local display, and several linux boxes exported apps to it (ie things which don't run well on irix), it was a great setup. I was even able to run quake on linux and have it display on the sgi, using the sgi opengl implementation (the linux host had only a basic embedded gpu with no opengl capability).

Ownership

[fluffernutter]

How will I own any of my data if I don't have a place in my house to store it all?

Re:Ownership

[MrLogic17]

Too late.
Where is your E-Mail? Not many regular users have full POP clients anymore.

That just one example.

Re:Ownership

[b0s0z0ku]

My email is both on the Internet and saved locally via an IMAP client. Most business users do the same, except with Outlook. Of course, email uses the Internet by necessity. There's no operational necessity to save locally-edited documents on Someone Else's Computer(tm), despite what Nerdella may want...

Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[DigitalSorceress]

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

Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Also, quite a lot of people love to own their data. Like physically own it and don't share it with random parties you really don't know anything about. Also, the speed and availability of access is an issue. God forbid your Internet dies and suddenly you cannot open anything on your no longer connected device.

Again the talks of desktop dying are mostly a click bate.

Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature

[blahplusplus]

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.

You don't seem to understand why companies want to get rid of freedom and general computing on the PC, we're seeing the big lockdown with windows 10.

See these numbers, this is what they want the lockdown that produces profits.

https://newzoo.com/wp-content/...

The last 20 years software has been locked down on the PC starting with RPG's when they were rebranded mmo's and taken hostage, the whole gameplan is to prevent software and file ownership on the PC. Steam and game companies have been getting away with this theft for years on the PC and mobile, where you pay for software, but never get a copy of said game or software making game preservation completely impossible.

Windows 10 already can disable and 'update the os' to disable your games, they want to move to feudal locked down computing where they are constantly checking and spying on you to see whether you have permission to run the software that is running on your PC.

We've already seen PC gaming in the AAA space have level editors and dedicated servers all but wiped out because of the desire for microtransactions and advertising/streaming, they want to monetize the time and attention of end users and that makes no ownership for you.

How will this work?

[b0s0z0ku]

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.

Re:How will this work?

[kerashi]

Even when you are connected to the internet, the vast majority of land area in the United States lacks the level of connectivity needed to support something like the article implies things are going to. It's already annoying enough that games are no longer shipping on discs (a 24-hour download is not uncommon here) and I bet if they tried to do away with the desktop, the torches and pitchforks would come out extremely quickly.

Speaking of which, I have a few extra pitchforks in the barn if anyone needs to borrow one.

END?

[JBMcB]

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.

Re:END?

[Zorro]

2040s - Will The Holodeck bring the end of Sex with Robots?

Re:END?

[Rick Schumann]

Tablets are fine for the filthy casuals of the world who only need to see email and YouTube videos. If you want to get real work done you need a real computer. Desktops will never go away, ever, it would make zero sense.

Gonna be retirement homes for GenX filled with...

[bigmacx]

...Dell Windows desktops and a data rack in every room filled with old Cisco gear to keep us warm.

Meet the new boss...

[msauve]

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."

Fortunately, this crap can be ignored

[gweihir]

And I will certainly do so.

Microsoft Has Fought This

[Jaime2]

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.

Nope

[dstyle5]

"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.

Nope

[DarkRookie2]

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.

Scary direction

[duke_cheetah2003]

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.

Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[TeknoHog]

This. One man's user friendliness is another man's developer hostility. All those user friendly layers you pile on top of the raw computing interfaces just get in the way of writing your own code. So you want to run your own software on Windows or Android? Here, just buy and install this huge development environment first. Because we try to separate the users from the developers as much as possible, we can't just let anyone code around.

http://iki.fi/teknohog/rants/w...
http://iki.fi/teknohog/rants/u...

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[ceoyoyo]

Soooo... you don't use an IDE?

I'm not making fun of you. I code in a minimal text editor. Code completion drives me up the wall. But almost nobody else does that.

Re:Linux is the successful desktop antithesis.

[TeknoHog]

Soooo... you don't use an IDE?

I'm not making fun of you. I code in a minimal text editor. Code completion drives me up the wall. But almost nobody else does that.

I code in a maximal text editor (emacs), but that's beside the point. The question is, are you allowed to code and run your own programs without becoming a Certified(TM) BigCompany(TM) Professional(TM) Developer(TM)?

This relates to another recent Slashdot thread -- how do today's kids get interested in programming? In the 80s, home computers would always come with some kind of programming environment by default. In fact, it was usually the default user interface itself (Basic interpreter). Today you need to jump through hoops to get things like a C compiler or a Python interpreter on Windows.

Um... I did this in 2001 with RDP

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:Um... I did this in 2001 with RDP

[thegarbz]

We got away from it because it was expensive to run the RDP

Bonus points for using the correct word there. We ditched a lot of things for reasons which included the word "was". Massive bandwidth increases, cloud computing, offloading data and processing has all completely changed the cost benefit equation.

Uh, what?

[squiggleslash]

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.

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?

Here we go again

[Dunbal]

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.

Linux on Arm

[Crashmarik]

Completely usable systems for less than $50

Just why do I care about Microsoft ?

This Hyperbole

[Only Time Will Tell]

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.

Nirvana

[Ol Olsoc]

Everyone will be a consumer, and no one will develop. There is no need for programmers any more.

Re: not iDiots...

[Monster_user]

XP was the worst OS in my opinion. I actually switched to Linux because XP sucked so badly, and didn't switch back until Vista was released.