Insights from the cloud

GuyClapperton 0 505 Views

So I'm helping host an event for Google yesterday - called Atmosphere, it was based in London and had about 300 CIOs present. I was lucky enough to be chairing a couple of panel discussions (and will put YouTube links in here if anyone's interested in what CIOs from Amazon, Jaguar Landrover and elsewhere had to say on the cloud).

One interesting point was when a member of the audience asked what the panel would be doing about Windows 7. The response was unanimous. First they said they wouldn't be doing anything on day one of a release of a new system and no self-respecting CIO would disagree (for what it's worth I found this an entirely reasonable view).

Second, though, after agreeing there might be a place for it in a couple of years, they added that they didn't care about Windows, Macs or anything else any more. The one thing driving these international CIOs is what you can find on the browser - what's useful, what's working, what's productive, if it's stored locally they just don't want to know any more.

This could end up as quite a shock to that nice Mr. Gates and even that nice Mr. Jobs as it starts to filter out to the small business community and then the consumer market. Cynics will say it's thin client all over again. Other critics say that themassive advance in the 1980s and 1990s was that everybody had a personal computer on their desk. But as one of the speakers said yesterday, arguably the big change now is that everyone's going to have their own managed data centre on their desk without having to worry how it's done.

Windows? Mac? Linux? I wonder how long we'll care?

Dani AI

Generated

captured a useful shorthand: many CIOs now judge platforms by the services they can deliver in a browser rather than by the underlying desktop OS. That shift is backed by scale — public cloud services are a major part of enterprise IT today (global public cloud revenue measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars). (businesswire.com)

The browser is no longer just a document viewer. Modern web platform features — installable PWAs, service workers for offline behavior, and WebAssembly for near‑native performance — make it realistic to deliver many user workflows from the web instead of a native app. That reduces friction for cross‑device deployments and for centrally managed data and policies. (developer.mozilla.org)

That said, the operating system has not disappeared. Desktop OSes remain widespread and endpoints still need policy, updates and local resource management — Windows alone still accounts for the majority of desktop usage worldwide — and enterprises are shifting controls to identity and access (zero‑trust) rather than trusting the network perimeter. (gs.statcounter.com)

Practical, short checklist for teams moving toward a browser/service‑first model:

  • Make identity the control plane: SSO, MFA and a zero‑trust access model before broad browser‑only rollouts. (csrc.nist.gov)
  • Contract for data portability and define export procedures up front to avoid lock‑in. (cloudsecurityalliance.org)
  • Prototype candidate apps as PWAs or WebAssembly modules and validate offline, latency and device‑integration needs. (developer.mozilla.org)
  • Keep endpoint/UEM and VDI strategies for GPU, driver or compliance‑sensitive workloads.
  • Use an established adoption framework to plan waves, governance and landing zones (for example, Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework) rather than switching everything at once. (learn.microsoft.com)

In short: the CIO shorthand about “not caring which OS” describes a priorities shift — services, identity and data protection now lead — but OSs still matter for certain workloads, governance and user experience.

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