So there has been a lot of talk recently about the next version of Windows going to the cloud and how great that would be.
I was talking to my buddy yesterday and he reminded me that a lot of people wouldn’t want all their documents on some hard drive in some data center somewhere far away.
In many ways, the loss of a physical hard drive that you can see and touch would be a dificult thing for a lot of end users to handle and accept.
While I personally wouldn’t mind it, I can see and understand the value to being able to (relatively) keep your content secure.
To that end, here’s my second use case for Windows 8.
- User sits down in front of their computer
- They boot up PC in less than 10 seconds
- The screen shows 3 fields
- Username
- Password
- Domain
- The Domain field would have both Cloud environments (defined by IP addresses) and a local hard drive choice as well.
- The catch is that even the hard drive “local” choice would be a VM as well.
- The user could then decided whether to log into the cloud or log into the drive.
Here’s the best part of that scenario.
Since this would be part of the transition process to get to the cloud, the footprint of the PC would be …well as small as this
Something you could put in your pocket and take from place to place if you needed to.
You wouldn’t need a huge form factor because all the information would be contained either on the tiny drive or the cloud.
This would be the best of both worlds. Portability and security all in one. No more huge Dell PC cases. Just a tiny case.
In the next posts, I will talk about the scenario for monitors and keyboards.
What do you guys and gals think?
This is an Apple TV with a Windows logo
If everything is cloud based, why buy an OS at all?
ios & android are both free when you buy the gadgets, and thats all cloud devices will be, gadgets. If hardware is totally simplistic and the info and programs etc are elsewhere, there is no need for expenseive complex operating systems. All you’ll need is iOS or Android or something similar; a couple hundred thousand lines of code vs millions of lines. Windows strenghth lay in it’s adaptability and the diversity of hardware it can run. Pushing folks to the cloud means you don’t need scalability or the ability to drive diverse hardware.
If MS seriously takes its products to the cloud, look for the end of windows domination and the era of free OSes to arise. And it wouldnt be long before free cloud alternatives replace office. Take Windows and Office out of Microsofts balance sheet and what are you left with? The barely profitable Xbox360.