The personal computer has changed the world in ways that were unimagined before its invention. Whether it was the beige box originally built by IBM in 1981 or one of the many clone PCs, the desktop computer transformed the world of work.
It has also driven a decades-long boom in productivity and spawned companies with market valuations today in the trillions of dollars — Microsoft ($2.5-trillion) and Apple ($3-trillion) are the most valuable companies in the world. Impressive, given that they were founded within a year of each other nearly half a century ago.
The modern computer industry as we know it was built largely by a handful of companies: IBM, which invented the PC (on a narrow definition of the term); Microsoft, which wrote and perfected the operating system software that powered the PC (MS-DOS, and then Windows); and a small group of companies (Microsoft, Lotus, WordPerfect, Corel, Adobe and Autodesk) that wrote the apps that convinced companies to begin computerising their operations.
Today the world runs on computers. Without them, global trade would grind to a halt; nothing would work. Technology is so baked into everything we do that going back to a world without computers is nigh impossible.
But that doesn’t mean the pace of technological change has slowed. In fact, the PC looks set to undergo yet another overhaul, one that could strip it of the operating system that helped make Microsoft the cash-flush giant it is today.
For years, former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy took great delight in publicly antagonising Microsoft and its founder and then CEO, Bill Gates, insisting that Windows was a terrible product; he described Windows NT as a “giant hairball”. He also told anyone who would listen that Windows was irrelevant because “the network is the computer”.
At the time, the idea of computing resources being delivered over a network from some amorphous “cloud” was unheard of. Windows was (and still is) a “fat client”: a feature-packed and resource-intensive operating system.
The concept of streamed software is becoming feasible because internet infrastructure has advanced in leaps and bounds
For decades, computer users were required to invest in frequent hardware upgrades to keep pace with increasingly complex software. For Microsoft and Intel — the chipmaker that profited handsomely from the rise of the PC — those were boom times. The “Wintel duopoly”, as it was known, drove the development of the early computer industry. (Apple was an outlier at the time, albeit an important one.) Intel later lost its way and its share price crashed, while Microsoft, which also went through a slump under Gates’s anointed successor, Steve Ballmer, has gone on to embrace cloud computing and tap into vast new riches under Satya Nadella.
Even as it embraces the cloud and spends billions of dollars on data centres, Microsoft is still regarded by many as the PC software company. It is known for Windows on servers and Windows on the desktop. So, a recent headline on US technology news website The Verge caught my attention: “Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud”.
What that means is that instead of installing Windows on your PC, Windows will be “streamed” to you, like a Netflix series, over your broadband connection. You’ll still be able to interact with the software and your apps using a mouse and a keyboard, though it won’t be installed locally but rather on a server in a data centre.
The concept of streamed software is becoming feasible because internet infrastructure has advanced in leaps and bounds. Most businesses and many consumers are hooked up to high-speed fibre. Gigabit-class connections at home will soon be commonplace.
Streaming has been coming in gaming for some time. Microsoft Flight Simulator, for example, has high-resolution images of the entire Earth. This 2-petabyte data set is far too big to fit on a regular computer, so Microsoft streams much of the simulator’s data over the internet. The next version of the simulator, due out next year, will lean even more heavily on streamed data to reduce the hefty demands placed on users’ PC hardware.
Nvidia, meanwhile, is rolling out a service called GeForce Now, which allows consumers to play advanced video games online without the need for an expensive PC. In effect you rent resources in a data centre while you play, obviating the need for an expensive gaming rig.
Microsoft is betting this same concept is going to reinvent Windows. In a way, the industry has come full circle from the days of the mainframe, when corporate users interacted via a “dumb terminal” on their desks with all the “intelligence” residing in the central server.
According to the article in The Verge, Microsoft is actively preparing for this future, not only in corporate environments, where Windows 365 is already available for streaming, but also in homes, where consumers are increasingly connected to uncapped high-speed internet.
It’s difficult to know today just how much all this is going to change computing; it’s clear only that there will be disruption. Will users spurn the idea of renting an operating system, or will they embrace it for its simplicity, convenience and low upfront cost? We’ll know soon enough.
* McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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