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The commentary here so far is technical — “it’s just RDP” — but I suspect the real story here is on the business side. The fact that no pricing is available is telling - this isn’t for consumers. But for big companies who get this as part of their enterprise agreements, I bet this is a big deal for their IT departments.



Yeah, this feels like a "why do you need an IT department?" kind of thing. Just rent your computers from MSFT and they'll take care of maintaining them, upgrading, etc. "It's all in the cloud" and all that.

It seems like the logical end goal would be you pay your subscription fee to Microsoft and you just sign in and all your subscription-based apps and data are just there, in the cloud, always available. You stop paying, they'll all go away... or are limited in some way.


I work in IT now and would love to get out of VDI. Other stuff to do!


If it's a business service RDP that would be Azure Virtual Desktop. Again, it very well may be something different. But this announcement doesn't make clear what that would be.


The announcement explicitly says that this is Azure Virtual Desktop.

"Windows 365 is built on Azure Virtual Desktop, but it simplifies the virtualization experience—handling all the details for you. "


Ah, I missed that. I guess we just have to wait and see some details. "Simplifies the experience" I don't know what that means.


There's a full video out there for 365 admins somewhere on the MS site (I'm sorry, the URL is on my other machine).

"Simplifies the experience" means, that with just 3 provisioning checkboxes against a user object in 365, you can grant that user a Windows 365 machine including all the 365 apps and your standard policies. It takes about 20 minutes from enablement for the VM to be ready, and the VM remains persistent for the lifetime of it's provisioning. The cost model is a fixed fee per provisioned user, per month.


Azure Virtual desktop was like a low level API… Citrix and VMWare sell brokering/provisioning solutions that instrument the Azure desktop.

Now that Citrix and VMWare brought this business to Azure, Microsoft is launching a competing offering. Nice guys they are lol.




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