Microsoft Suggests Businesses Buy Fewer PCs (theregister.com) 66
In early April with the start of previews for "Windows Frontline" -- a service that provides a single license for frontline employees to use up to three Cloud PCs, Microsoft floated the idea that businesses should buy fewer PCs. The Register reports: The "Frontline" name hints at its purpose: Microsoft thinks this license will benefit organizations that employ shift workers in roles like customer support or healthcare. Microsoft imagines shift workers will log on for eight hours, then the next worker on duty will do likewise, and advances this as a fairer way to charge than assuming cloud PCs are used 24x7. To burnish that argument, Microsoft's launch material for Windows Frontline included research (PDF) by tech sustainability consultancy Px3 that tries to answer the question "Can modern work applications and endpoints abate end user computing greenhouse gas emissions and drive climate action?" The answer is "Yes," when one considers cloudy PCs to be "modern endpoints."
The research reaches that conclusion with analysis of the energy consumption of desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and thin clients, compared to the impact of running a Cloud PC. The research also considers bring your own PC plans that see business fund the acquisition of PCs that their staff use for personal and employment purposes, meaning fewer devices need to be summoned into existence and fewer resources are consumed because users operate one machine instead of two. Px3 instead imagines that end users and their sole device to access a Windows365 Cloud PC when they're on the clock. Doing so would mean corporate PC replacement cycles could stretch to eight years!
Readers will not be surprised that the research found the combination of Windows365 and a bring your own PC plan has significantly lower environmental impact and is therefore a jolly good idea. The research's concluding paragraph states "it is reasonable to state that modern work applications and endpoint computers not only abate GHG emissions, they are perhaps critical to securing a sustainable future." That's perhaps a little overblown but the point is made: slowing consumption is a good idea and it's now possible to turn down the speed of the PC upgrade treadmill.
The research reaches that conclusion with analysis of the energy consumption of desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and thin clients, compared to the impact of running a Cloud PC. The research also considers bring your own PC plans that see business fund the acquisition of PCs that their staff use for personal and employment purposes, meaning fewer devices need to be summoned into existence and fewer resources are consumed because users operate one machine instead of two. Px3 instead imagines that end users and their sole device to access a Windows365 Cloud PC when they're on the clock. Doing so would mean corporate PC replacement cycles could stretch to eight years!
Readers will not be surprised that the research found the combination of Windows365 and a bring your own PC plan has significantly lower environmental impact and is therefore a jolly good idea. The research's concluding paragraph states "it is reasonable to state that modern work applications and endpoint computers not only abate GHG emissions, they are perhaps critical to securing a sustainable future." That's perhaps a little overblown but the point is made: slowing consumption is a good idea and it's now possible to turn down the speed of the PC upgrade treadmill.
So... (Score:2, Informative)
The adverts urging them to in windows 11 don't help, then?
Most "office work" can be done with the computing power of a Z80. The rest is window dressing. (Yes, it's pretty and comfy and convenient... but for quite a lot of work, doesn't materially add to the productivity.) So if you're looking to save the environment through reduced compute use, why, microsoft seems to be in an ideal position, with that userbase of theirs. Too bad their skillset isn't up to the task.
Nor their interest. Instead of having on
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
From the Microsoft sales pitch linked from TFS:
Frontline workers often share physical PCs or kiosks, which some CIOs have told us pose real security and identity challenges.
Microsoft found some companies that screwed up when sharing hardware across employees, so they want lots of companies to pay Microsoft to screw things up for them instead.
Something like that, anyway.
Everything old is new again (Score:2)
Sun Rays did this very well. They also had very nice TFTs for the time. Anyway. Your session would be bound to a chip card. Pull the chip, put it in another, and your session would follow.
You'd still use a lock screen to protect the session, but it was a convenient way to take your session with you.
Too bad oracle killed it and they're not very amendable to FOSS client s/w.
I can't imagine microsoft doing this as well, nevermind do better. But it'll probably take a large amount of microsoft-licensed infras
Re: So... (Score:2)
I am a human who can only read english, and it made sense to me. Maybe the AC comment is from someone who is used to toktik and emojicons as their primary language.
Cloud PC's? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Yes. Microsoft pitches it as a way to share licenses across users -- if an employer has precisely eight-hour shifts with no overlap, they can schedule three employees to use one set of licenses ... at least for Windows 365, it's not clear whether other Microsoft products are included yet.
Microsoft gives the example of LG's 2023 line of Smart TVs as thin clients that support this. Pair a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with your TV, and you too could be a distributed call center drone while parked on your cou
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Microsoft gives the example of LG's 2023 line of Smart TVs as thin clients that support this. Pair a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with your TV, and you too could be a distributed call center drone while parked on your couch at home!
You can do that from any Android device [google.com]. I do kind of think that for some reason it's not in the android TV play store, though. If true (not going to check rn) it's both easily fixed and also really dumb.
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That's what businesses want. No need to rent space for the computer or employees, along with electricity and some additional support staff to keep it all working. They have a contract with Microsoft covering the security and secrecy of their data, and from their point of view their own employees are just as likely to be the ones stealing it.
It's only when they start to notice that the cost keeps going up and it is now more expensive that they start to go off the idea.
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That's what businesses want. No need to rent space for the computer or employees, along with electricity and some additional support staff to keep it all working.
That seems at odds with the amount of corporate pushback we've seen against the work-from-home trend.
It's only when they start to notice that the cost keeps going up and it is now more expensive that they start to go off the idea.
I can't help noticing parallels between the prediction you just made, and the recent disfavour for globalization. Not the same thing at all, but it has a similar flavour of predictable regret.
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That seems at odds with the amount of corporate pushback we've seen against the work-from-home trend.
The Boomers in middle to upper management want to go back to having affairs and they can only do that if they force everyone back into the office.
LK
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Sounds like thin client to me. What is old is new. You know back in the day we had these things called terminals yada yada... but hey they beat teletypes.
That is exactly what this sounds like. Another incarnation of VMWare Horizon or Citrix. We use Horizon to give hourly folks a thin client to access a virtual desktop wherever they may be (they can even access their VM via an external portal from their home pc). Our laptop users can access a virtual desktop from their Horizon client if needed or can just use the laptop itself. We don't even use regular desktop computers. Thin clients or laptop is all we have.
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Yeah its a thin clienty type thing.
I asked Microsoft Bing chat thingo to summarize the frontline link without the "marketing gobledegook" and it gave me this response;--
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I remember a company called Lastfoot doing a VNC remote desktop [googleusercontent.com] to a Linux machine in 1999 and 2000. It worked decently on my university's LAN and OK on my 1.5mb/384kbps ADSL but forget anything else. I made some decent use of it for school work without having to manage a laptop or floppies or other storage, but it disappeared somewhat suddenly and caught me out. Fortunately I had plenty of backups.
Ended up rolled into Netraverse/TreLOS/some chain of companies as happened in the dotcom era which led to Win4
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Or, the thin clients could be running Chrome and just accessing web apps rather than any sort of "desktop" environment.
Re:Cloud PC's? (Score:5, Informative)
--This is a terrible idea, if your company's Internet goes down you can't do jack shit - and it places a reliance on 1 horrible tech company for all/most of your daily major business tasks.
--Having a local network, local storage, etc still makes sense so you can still do things even if you can't talk to the rest of the world.
--That said, MS has made Win11 so horribad that I've seen this coming for years.
Re: Cloud PC's? (Score:2)
Quiet you. Your common sense has no place in Marketing land. *sticks fingers in ears* La la la, I can't hear you!
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Oh, but this is a thin client "in the cloud." That makes all the difference, don't you know? And of course, they can then charge more.
Re:Nobody in IT wants Windows anymore. (Score:4, Interesting)
They jumped the shark. Windows is done. It is a toy OS now. No good for work of any kind.
I agree with your first three points, which are primarily esthetic and therefore entirely subjective. But your fourth is demonstrably untrue.
The fact that neither you nor I can use the abomination for serious work, doesn't mean that most people don't use it on a daily basis to get important things done. I do feel sorry for them having to do that though. I watch my wife put up with it for work, and it's ugly.
The Eighties Called (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a little new (Score:3)
The downside is you have to deal with people's PCs breaking/getting viruses and you don't own those PCs. But for call centers you just fire those people and replace them. Productivity increases and globalization mean there's plenty of cheap labor in the pool.
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PC? A thin client doesn't need to be any bigger than a raspberry pi. Why does Microsoft insist on having such complex client setups? Just plug in a keyboard mouse and screen. Of course everyone wants the laptop form factor even for long hours.
Because it makes their OEMs happy (Score:2)
If anything this is a little surprising. It undermines their OEMs' sales.
Re:The Eighties Called (Score:4, Insightful)
So do I. I miss X11. It had a lot of flaws, but the ability to run a program on one machine and display its GUI on another was fantastic. Way better than remote desktop. X11 rendered the GUI on your local machine and was much faster than piping the whole framebuffer across the network. And since it was done on an individual program level rather than a system level you could easily interact with programs running on different machines. Even embedded stuff like logic analyzers and digital oscilloscopes, supported X and could export their UI. I really wish we still had a good application-level cross-platform widely-implemented display protocol.
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Well X11 is still around and I enjoy using it from time to time. Don’t know much about this new weyland and what it’ll support.
Thing about remote X11 is that a lot of people are totally unaware of its’ existence as a remote desktop tool I’ve definitely surprised a few smart people over the years launching remote apps. I think part of the problem is that X happened a long long time ago and has no corporate cheerleaders and as a matter of fact a lot of companies are offering competin
I would suggest businesses by less ... (Score:4)
... Microsoft. Or subscribe less Microsoft.
But maybe that's just me.
Re: I would suggest businesses by less ... (Score:2)
What would you have them use, that god awful Google office suite? That's the worst piece of software ever written. Try opening an excel file in shits and see how it goes.
Re:I would suggest businesses by less ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If only!
I'm working at a business, now, that's "all in" on the MS Office 365 suite of applications. As Microsoft has long been known to do, they were pretty clever about slowly convincing you to dump competing products in favor of just paying one monthly subscription price for their solutions. (Using Slack? No need! Just switch to Teams, which comes with your subscription! Uploading video to services like YouTube for your Enterprise's use? No need! Just use Microsoft Stream, which conveniently also comes with your subscription! Paying DropBox or Box for your cloud drive storage needs? Cancel that stuff! Microsoft OneDrive has you covered as part of your subscription! Oh, and BTW? We're gonna rope you into using SharePoint while we're at it, because it's basically your web front-end for any of your OneDrive content you want to share with entire groups of people. Your company wouldn't happen to still be using some 3rd. party VoIP provider for desk phones and soft-phones, would they? MS Teams offers an optional subscription upgrade to handle all of that too.)
And once they've got you that far in, you're probably going to use Power BI web applications as well, to "modernize" all the reports you need people to view or work with.
Trust me... with all THESE eggs in one basket, there's an outage or performance problem almost DAILY with one aspect of it or another. But hey ... you paid for it!
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You've said everything I would, so no need to repeat it. :) Shame I don't have any moderation points.
Just to add... George Carlin would say "they got you by the balls!" lol More people should give Linux a go. I wouldn't change Linux for anything. it got me by the balls. lol For all the quite different reasons though, but mainly the feeling of "my OS and I do what I want with it and it looks exactly the way I like it!"
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If only!
I'm working at a business, now, that's "all in" on the MS Office 365 suite of applications. As Microsoft has long been known to do, they were pretty clever about slowly convincing you to dump competing products in favor of just paying one monthly subscription price for their solutions.
And once they've got you that far in, you're probably going to use Power BI web applications as well, to "modernize" all the reports you need people to view or work with.
That sounds very like the business where I work, that is also "all in".
Power BI, though, have pulled back the curtain a bit too much (for the rest of Microsoft) - I tried to utilise one feature, and got a "you need the premium version for that. You only have the pro version" (or similar). A Power BI guru told me that the pro version was a lowish amount per seat per month. The premium version was all that plus a five-figure sum per premium user per month. No doubt Microsoft finance would have preferred those
That'll be the day.. (Score:2)
...that I trust GAFAM with my data or documents.
Never gonna happen.
Windows 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were even remotely serious about environmental impact, they would drastically reduce the HW requirements for Windows 11 - in particular the supported processors. Intel processors from before 2017 are rejected, as are some AMD processors from 2018 as well as all from before that. At least it is possible to upgrade processors which use the AM4 socket.
(as an aside, I replaced one such AM4 processor 6 months ago. The new processor needed a BIOS update to work, the old processor was then no longer supported and could not even be used to apply that update. Luckily I have another machine with a processor which worked with both BIOS levels).
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Agreed . . . this is Microsoft greenwashing marketing nonsense.
What this really means:
No. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Microsoft doesn't offer that option. Your options are "yes, bend me over now" and "maybe later".
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Microsoft doesn't offer that option. Your options are "yes, bend me over now" and "maybe later".
This is Microsoft's 21st century re-imagining of the Unexplained Application Error: Abort/Retry/Fail.
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^^ This. +5 Insightful
what a hilariously bad idea for Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
Whether this is a good or bad service for a business to subscribe to I'll leave to others, but this is a terrible idea for Microsoft. Especially today, Windows is no easier to use than any other operating system. At the point where you're connecting to entire remote machines for portions of your workflow, it becomes more practical to replace parts of your workflow normally done on Windows with some other OS. This is just begging to become irrelevant. Without lock-in, Microsoft is done.
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... Windows is no easier to use than any other operating system. At the point where you're connecting to entire remote machines for portions of your workflow, it becomes more practical to replace parts of your workflow normally done on Windows with some other OS.
Good point. It would be such a sweet irony if this resulted in The Year of Linux on the Desktop. Even if it was "on the Client" it would still be a pretty welcome development. But ChromeOS might fill the void instead.
This is just begging to become irrelevant. Without lock-in, Microsoft is done.
And wouldn't that be just so fucking wonderful! I'm not holding my breath, but it's nice to dream.
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If it works, then Microsoft is ecstatic at the result.
That client device they are getting the company to ditch? *Maybe* $200 every 3 years, and companies are holding on to their devices even longer.
A comparable 'cloud instance' for that same employee? $54 dollars a month, $32 a month if the employer is stingy to the employee and downgrades them along the way. Generally within 6 months they've made more money off that employee than they would have over 3 years.
In terms of lockin? They absolutely still have
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In terms of lockin? They absolutely still have the lockin, the instance is still Windows.
The whole premise is that you can start to replace Windows most easily if you're using it this way. Every windows license they help you ditch is that much less lock-in. If they're not convincing you that you need PCs with their OS in house, then they're losing their advantage. You can connect to anything remotely, it doesn't have to be Windows.
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You still need Windows to run your apps, until they are all moved to web based SaaS
Which is happening left and right, but more to the point, will happen quicker if more people can switch.
or you convince your vendors to support a non-windows OS.
Also happening, though not as much. Still, nobody wants to be forced to stick with Windows if they can avoid it.
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Which is happening left and right, but more to the point, will happen quicker if more people can switch.
It is happening left and right. It won't happen any more quickly than it already is though. "Finally we can run Linux desktops while remotely accessing Windows, time to pull the trigger on investing in porting our last stuff to Web applications" is not a thought remotely on any business' mind.
Still, nobody wants to be forced to stick with Windows if they can avoid it.
In practice, about 70% of people just don't care at all and don't even pay attention to what the platform is. I'll grant a small population of folks using Windows against their wills due to work requirements, *maybe*
Re: (Score:2)
But the point of this offering is that you still have and are paying for a Windows license, just not on the device that your fingers are touching. Much to Microsoft's glee, the license is per *person* rather than per device and charged *per month* in perpetuity.
It is true that the device (which currently is likely to have included a perpetual license for Windows) may be less inclined to bother to include a Windows license, but that is a tradeoff they would not mind at all. If the entire desktop market wer
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Without lock-in, Microsoft is done.
Dude, we're talking about application-centric cloud services. The whole lock-in here is not that you use their OS, but that they have and arbitrate your data.
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Just for the record, with decades of experience using computers, I find Windows 7 and up the most complicated to use of all OSes I've ever used. So many "idio-fail-safe" features especially, has made it actually more complicated to use. But garbled/bloated/confusing GUI is just one of the plethora of problems with Windows nowadays. The main problem with it is that it's made from ideas of a bunch of corporate arseholes with a shareholder's axe hanging over their greedy little heads.
April fools is over, why do we persist... (Score:2)
In early April with the start of previews for "Windows Frontline" -- a service that provides a single license for frontline employees to use up to three Cloud PCs, Microsoft floated the idea that businesses should buy fewer PCs. The Register reports:
So now not only is it essential to have a PC, we also need all the infrastructure to connect it that goes with it and the licenses per employee and an additional license for online.
Who are frontline employees? For me frontline employees are waiters, cashiers, check in agents at airlines and car rental centers, etc... Basically all they need is access to their ERP/PMS which handles login and access. They don't need Windows or Microsoft.
I can't think of one instance where this makes any sense except for Micro
Re: (Score:2)
I can't think of one instance where this makes any sense except for Microsoft to condition corporations that licenses are for 8 hour shifts.
Ah, so you do understand it.
MBAs will love it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Meanwhile you could piece this shit together 10 years ago using X11,EC2, EFS, and a pile of rescued e-waste and it would cost almost nothing. But yeah cool.
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Where previously client software licenses were associated with the hardware and could be used by 3 different employees if you ran 3 shifts. With this new invention from Microsoft, licensing is per employee and there's no software to install on the Windows based client computer, it's on a server which also has licensing feees associated with it.
Look for the Ads coming soon, "Rent Everything" by Micros
So... (Score:2)
Does that mean Win11 will drop the TPM requirement, which is pretty much the only reason why companies would buy new PCs, since processing speed is by no means a limiting factor anymore?
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Tell me about it. I had to, for company-internal reasons.
Win11 is like your girlfriend moving in. You're pretty sure everything you owned is still there, but you can't find anything anymore because she rearranged all your stuff since she thinks she knows better where your stuff belongs.
Pushing all the costs onto employees (Score:1)
The article mentions "business fund the acquisition of PCs that their staff use", nah that's not how this will work. Simply pass the cost onto the worker as a new "employee tax", with minimum specs and upgrades no longer coming out of the company's pockets. MBAs will love this idea, IT will cry in a dark corner
Perspective from large IT (Score:1)
Most posts I've read seem to be from a small-IT perspective. From a large-IT perspective, this proposal seems fine, and I'm willing to learn more.
We have ~70k desktops, redundant data centers, etc. Desktops are not optional, needed for mission-specific fat applications. Thin clients are not optional, needed for mission-specific applications deployed on Citrix. Our employees work in shifts, 24/7, and share computers. This effort could reduce the number of desktops required, reducing both the cost and en
Nothing new, same attempts (Score:1)
It's the same old thing these companies try to do. "Give us complete control of your infrastrucutre, be completely reliant on us and our policies, and pay us what we want or else you go out of business".
They don't like that people are purchasing hardware, maintaining control over it, not having to change their workflow, policies and data collection to suit Microsoft, and making money while something just works and not having to constantly shell a percentage of their earnings to Microsoft.
It's kind of like h
Nobody in IT wants Windows anymore. (Score:1)
Terrible idea and concept! (Score:2)
For a computer with 8 cores and 32GB of ram, it's $330 / month! That's an insane cost for that type of resource allocation, and unless you have a good reason to allocate, why would you? In some cases, a VM makes great sense, and it's a sound investment, but for the average employee it's nonsense.
If you're worried about mixi
Real headline: (Score:2)
Microsoft Suggests Businesses Own Fewer PCs
A suggestion (Score:1)