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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Ownership

[fluffernutter]

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

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

[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.

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.

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."

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.

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.