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 $349 (£349), and its real utility is to those fully invested in Microsoft’s cloudy vision.
Probably an ARM computer running skeleton Windows and RDP.
Why bother with such a thing when a NUC could do the compute locally in the same form-factor? Other than corpo data theft paranoia, but the risk of lost productivity from cloud failure seems a bigger risk than that.
aka a thin-client
The circle of computing: thin-thick-thin-thick-thin
Yeah I love how people are panning it and laughing, but thin clients are bread and butter to most enterprises. I think we have around 1,800 deployed at last count. The price is competitive and if you’ve gone all in on the Microsoft ecosystem it makes sense.
What is their endgame here? Why do people want this also
25 years ago we were using SUN thin clients connected to a single huge server on campus. Shortly after they were replaced with thick Dell PCs running XP.
Priced it out for my company, and I don’t understand where this makes sense in any way. You spend a shit ton more for the server you get less for end users and thin clients are still expensive. Plus, bonus, you now have a single point of failure. Or at least a small handful if you duplicate properly.
Converting that cost into a perpetual monthly bill isn’t going to change it magically
Well they make a lot of sense if you can’t trust your clients.
My high school’s computer lab were all thin clients. I was told each cost like 20$ (wouldn’t be surprised if he exaggerated the cheapness a bit), and the server was being used for more than just the thin clients, anyway.
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Huh. My first rule of IT was “No, I will not give you free tech support during my time off from work”.
There was an exception if I was sleeping with you at the time. 😂
“can you look at my phone? I can’t pair my Bluetooth earbuds and-”
“since this is a new relationship, you have not met the minimum requirement of fucking me yet. ticket postponed.”
The server for this product is Microsofts cloud, so there is no server cost, you’re just bought into their ecosystem and maybe a slightly higher subscription cost.
It also means little to no hardware maintenance and streamlined IT processes.
I’m bot saying it’s my kind of approach, but there are definitely a lot of companies that could benefit (given most people are really just using a browser and maybe some word/PowerPoint software).
What makes you think people want it at all?
I would want it hadn’t the the divded states recently gone full fascist regime: as a software developer, I wouldn’t want to have windows dirt on my hardware, but I could test software for windows users. I had been looking in vain for a Windows+Office VM subscription before. Ship has sailed though, now I can just say fuck Windows.
They are (can be) cheap. Dependent on whatever remote desktop service you use, though.
For simple office work, you don’t really need much to stand up a set of thin clients other than a good network and peripheral hardware.
A Dell thin client goes for like $300-500 while a full desktop is $1000-1500 from them (actual prices may vary by company contract), so it’s typically less upfront cost, especially if your company is already using a remote desktop service.
The remote desktop aspect is nice in a few ways, can use whatever thin client and all your stuff is there, but you lose out on stuff like GPU acceleration and at least where I worked where we mainly used thin clients, can be very laggy compared to native.
If they knew what they wanted, they wouldn’t use Windows.
It’s a brilliant move on Microsoft’s part. Idiot Veeps who can’t install anything on their own computers will buy them by the truckload for their “technology enablement groups” to do “amazing AI things in the cloud” with.
There was a very, very brief point in human history when fucking chuds who smarmed their way over from Sales didn’t run IT.
🤣 my last boss was the president of the consortium’s IT company. He came from sales and didn’t know shit about anything IT related. Dude was the worst boss I’ve ever had.
350 bucks for a device that does no processing by itself?
ill go out on a limb and assume they want a subscription out of it too?
Looks like we just found our new marketing VP!
How i see this “box”:
Blessed by Stephen Hawking himself
They dont even want us to own computers anymore
Impersonal computing
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.
"Move Windows to the ‘Cloud’ "
Only $349 + whatever the Window Live subscription fee is, now. What an idiotic idea.
They announced these at Ignite last year along with a swath of Copilot modules.
The goal is to provide low cost alternatives to either
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Upgrading existing systems to win11, if the hardware supports it.
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Offering a “low cost” alternative to an additional $30 for an extended year of win10 support.
Long term goal is to move Windows completely to a subscription model either way. Little Black Boxes are just initial way to present this as an overall savings to the Enterprise Market. And I believe it will work to some degree on the quarterly focused businesses that are already balls deep in Microsoft’s ecosystem’s. There is an unfathomable amount of win10 systems still in use across the globe and they are fast nearing EOS.
This was the last straw for me, swapped to Linux Mint at the beginning of the year and I haven’t had any major issues yet!
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Yawn. That compute model worked OK for some corporate setups 20 years ago. Granted RDP has improved.
Hey I saw this episode of Silicon Valley!
invested in
infested with.
FIFY
Microsoft reintroduces the dumb terminal
so this is for me if i have a cloudy vision?
