The Windows 365 Link is a small black box that connects over the internet to a Windows 365 Cloud PC running in the Azure cloud. Microsoft has priced it at $349 (£349), and its real utility is to those fully invested in Microsoft’s cloudy vision.
How i see this “box”:
aka a thin-client
The circle of computing: thin-thick-thin-thick-thin
Absolutely. These existed years ago, I remember putting them in for a client. I also put in Sun Java Stations for another client. Neither of these were “cloud” but they were both running what we now call commonly Virtual Desktop Environments (VDI) from on-premises servers.
What is their endgame here? Why do people want this also
25 years ago we were using SUN thin clients connected to a single huge server on campus. Shortly after they were replaced with thick Dell PCs running XP.
It’s wireless, Jen.
Sure, let’s just move your personal desktop to someone else’s computer where you don’t even own the data. What could possibly go wrong?
This isn’t targeted at personal desktops. This is for enterprise use, where you didn’t own the data in the first place.
I worked in (Canadian) government for a while and we used our desktops as thin clients in a way. That wasn’t the intended use of our desktops but the office internet was just so insanely locked down that nearly every site was blocked. Like trying to watch a YouTube tutorial? Blocked. Trying to read a forum thread to debug something? Blocked. It was stupid.
We all just ended up RPCing into Azure VMs because we’d actually be able to do our work that way.
Not super related but something I think about sometimes lol
You’re right. It’s still stupid though.
Companies should be at least as concerned with privacy and autonomy as individuals. Running everything on Microsoft Clouds, with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office makes you massively vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft. And many of the potential customers are actually Microsoft’s competitors on some level.
Thin clients may be a good model for some businesses, but this device particularly seems to be tailored to use only Microsoft’s Azure cloud as opposed to self-hosting. Moving the computation to Microsoft’s cloud doesn’t make it inherently safer.
Probably an ARM computer running skeleton Windows and RDP.
Why bother with such a thing when a NUC could do the compute locally in the same form-factor? Other than corpo data theft paranoia, but the risk of lost productivity from cloud failure seems a bigger risk than that.
"Move Windows to the ‘Cloud’ "
Only $349 + whatever the Window Live subscription fee is, now. What an idiotic idea.
invested in
infested with.
FIFY
They dont even want us to own computers anymore
Impersonal computing
Hey I saw this episode of Silicon Valley!
Microsoft reintroduces the dumb terminal
Yawn. That compute model worked OK for some corporate setups 20 years ago. Granted RDP has improved.
