Remember when Google did this and it failed because PC gamers dont want 1700 stores for games. They just want Steam or GOG.

These companies do not know their customer base and it costs them.

I do see these devices making way more sense for enterprise on the other hand, to the dismay of many. But for the average consumer maybe not. I assume they are going to recycle the same tech they are using to let you stream Xbox games.

If Windows wasnt so damned bloated this wouldnt cost them much. Every Windows laptop that was nearing its end of life became magically better and still in my house all 15 years later after I installed Linux. Wild.

20/40/70 GB of outbound data is included, depending on the tier.

But you need to meet pretty high licensing requirements, e.g. for enterprise:

Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Microsoft 365 F3, Microsoft 365 E3, and Microsoft 365 E5, including versions of these suites that do not include Microsoft Teams, as well as Microsoft 365 A3, Microsoft 365 A5, and Microsoft 365 Education Student Use Benefit.

Which means around 20€ per month for business premium. They are also managed in intune, so you need someone with intune expertise.

> how leadership at the same company can simultaneously believe all of "network egress is a staggeringly expensive component of data center rollout" yet "we should stream real-time input and video instead of shipping client software"

The leadership doesn’t believe egress is expensive.

And neither do the customers believe it.

However the customers are okay paying the egress price. So it stays, regardless of what leadership or customers say.

You don't account the "reliability" of cloud. What if Azure goes dark?

> Just very unclear who any of these services are for.

These services are for Microsoft, to serve Microsoft's business needs at the customer's expenses.

Look at Azure and how it designed it's products around the concept of accounts. Azure is supposed to be a cloud provider but their offering is built around charging customers for provisioning dedicated hardware that users then can run their apps on.

Even their function-as-a-service offer requires you to pay por the dedicated hardware where to deploy your event handlers.

If you look at Azure as Active Directory/Entra ID attracting and locking in enterprise accounts, you start to see these service account products as a way to price gouge customers. You have customers locked in with the auth system who then have to manage competing pressures such as "I need to keep my azure resources independent of other teams/projects" and "why do I need to pay 100$/month for a dedicated app service plan with two cores if all I want is a small internal app that might run the occasional background job"

> Ai Pin will still allow for offline features like battery level, etc.

If I remember correctly, battery level was practically the only "offline feature" of the pin. A device whose only working feature is to check its own battery level isn't much use.

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To be fair it’s a notoriously difficult thing to plan for. It’s less about incompetence, and more about having a strong understanding of user requirements, and a streamlined way to allocate costs to each business area based on their needs. That’s really hard for any company or MSP to do.

Variable costs means you never want to over invest in unused cores and memory, which leads to over subscribing those cores and memory… that’s fine for normal working hours, except Monday mornings when everyone starts logging in at once.

You can’t really queue logins that in a way that doesn’t make users think they’re using an infuriatingly slow machine.

Hospitals are about to go for this product like fucking catnip. It's all they've ever wanted for the fleet of 10k dumb client devices that all run Epic and nothing else.

I had the same question as you. Then I read TFA and discovered that the question was answered in the first paragraph of TFA.

Until I found out reading the article I have thought the headline was a joke and I was going to end up on a think piece or satire.

I remember my first internship for a Boeing subcontractor in 2010ish went all-in on thin clients for like half the company of 200 employees or so. But with an on-prem Windows Terminal Server as the backend for RDP.

It was mostly fine-ish except for some annoyances like streaming audio being fairly sketchy for the era which bothered the techs who normally spent like ten hours a day listening to Pandora on headphones while making repairs.

Ended up having to block it to maintain decent performance for everyone because it bogged down the 100 Mbit LAN which resulted in a lot of grumbling and unhappy people. I imagine it's more viable these days.

The clients themselves were pretty cool though: cheap, booted almost instantly and ran cold. Until that job I had no idea how efficient RDP was as providing a near realtime experience even when bandwidth constrained.

At my current job there are a couple VMs I can only use via RDP and I honestly forget I'm even using it most of the time until the occasional random glitch reminds me.

This is for corporations too incompetent or too lazy to deploy Citrix infra, so they'd rather rent it from Microsoft As A Service. VDI can be very expensive so this could be win-win.

That’s exactly what I thought. They look like very thin client I’ve come across and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a rebadge.

Yes, thin clients will be invented every couple years. They fit… a niche.

Yes, that was a first party product, now third party vendors are releasing their equivalent.

1997 Sun rays.

Doesn't it just need a browser?

Every 5 or 10 years they seem to make a comeback.

No one reads articles, they just ask questions based on the headline

In the first paragraph

> In 2024, Microsoft announced Windows 365 Link, a thin client for accessing the service, and today, the company is expanding the lineup with two more devices from its partners.

If you're doing any serious CAD work you really need a Windows PC, and better yet a config that is ISV approved and tested.

Apple still quietly designing all their products on Windows these days? Not that there's anything wrong with that...