For example, connectivity is not distributed equally across the globe, which means access to compute performance would be determined arbitrarily by location. “It’s our job to enable flexibility and land ready-made solutions for customers.”Īn entirely cloud-based OS would admittedly throw up a number of challenges. “It’s not about the reduction to a single local or cloud-based solution, it’s about having the choice of both and enabling additional scenarios,” said Marcuss. The ambition is not necessarily to develop a wholly cloud-based OS, but rather to blend together the experience such that a broader number of use cases are supported and a broader range of users provided for. Getting ahead of ourselvesĪhead of this week’s Windows 11 event, we spoke with Wangui McKelvey, GM of Microsoft 365, and Aidan Marcuss, CVP Windows Device and App Experience, to hear about the company’s vision for Windows and the cloud.Īsked directly whether the logical conclusion to the current Windows 11 trajectory is an operating system detached entirely from the device, we were told this isn’t Microsoft’s vision for now. The main priority for device makers would instead become support for lightning-fast connectivity with as little latency as possible. With compute taken care of in the cloud, there would be little need for giant SoCs, which would mean more freedom when it comes to form factor. The transition to a cloud model would also change the paradigm from a hardware perspective. Under this arrangement, customers might pay for PC hardware in installments alongside their compute and cloud storage, similar to the way smartphones are often sold today. Microsoft could use a new cloud-based OS as the foundation for an even more concerted drive into PC-as-a-Service, normalizing the model on offer with Shadow and GeForce Now, whereby any PC can be turned into a powerhouse workstation or gaming rig. There are currently twelve separate Cloud PC configurations, each of which offers a different amount of resources, and customers can switch between the tiers at any time. Windows 365 is marketed as a service that provides professionals with unrivaled flexibility, in terms of the location and device they work from, but also the resources available to them. But in a broader context, shifting to a cloud setup is more about enabling new models of consumption. In a business setting, moving to a cloud-only system would give IT administrators tighter control over security configuration and identity management, and full oversight of how devices are being used. Microsoft has already announced it will allow Windows 365 customers to boot directly into their cloud desktop, bypassing the local OS, which feels only one step short of the cloud-only vision. But the logical next step might be to take the whole lot into the cloud, à la Chrome OS.
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