Microsoft increasingly wants to turn Windows 11 into a cloud service. An internal presentation from last year shows that the company is working on having the OS run entirely in the cloud, similar to Windows 365. It is not known what the concrete plans are.
Microsoft says in an internal presentation that it sees this as a long-term opportunity for the operating system. The presentation surfaced during the lawsuit that the American FTC is conducting with Microsoft regarding the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. According to The Verge Microsoft’s strategy around gaming and cloud computing emerged. Microsoft calls that strategy Modern Life. It shows the company’s vision for how it plans to grow Windows 11 and market services like Xbox’ Game Pass and Bing.
In that presentation, Microsoft specifically mentions Windows 11 as a cloud service. That’s a “long-term, needle-moving opportunity,” the company said. Microsoft wants to move Windows 11 ‘increasingly towards the cloud’. That would build on the current Windows 365, a package in which Windows 10 or 11 is streamed from the cloud to computers. Microsoft wants to “use the power of the cloud and client to enable AI services and full roaming of people’s digital experience.”
The presentation only describes an opportunity and not a concrete plan. In the 2022 financial year, Microsoft focused mainly on the growth of PCs and systems running Windows 11 in order to ‘popularize the Windows developer platform through new OS innovations’. The company also wants to grow services such as Microsoft 365, Xbox Game Pass and Edge and Bing by integrating them more deeply into the operating system. In recent years, Microsoft has increasingly been criticized for forcing certain software such as the browser on users. Microsoft calls the strategy successful if “developers choose our software store as the best place to reach customers” and if there are multiple apps with more than a hundred million daily active users.
Microsoft has also included in its long-term strategy that it wants to build its own chipsets that should give Windows an advantage over the competition. The company does not mention any specific details about this, but earlier this year there were rumors that Microsoft is working on its own Arm Silicon chips that are intended for a future version of Windows. The document also states that Microsoft wants to grow inorganically through partnerships or acquisitions – which is ultimately what the lawsuit with the FTC is about.