I had my entire executive team in the Ignite session where Satya Nadella announced these things... and everyone was just so darned excited.
Then I showed them this:
https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Pro-Desktop-Computer-1000Mbps/dp/B0C89TQ1YF
I said, I'll sell these when MS cuts the price in half, because that's what they are worth. We can do this ourselves with more control, less headaches, and better margins. Cold water on my C suite did exactly what I needed it to do, so onward to using brain cells... These are NOT useless, though I struggle to find an SMB use, SMC use... sure... but not SMB. For those that haven't seen "SMC" before, that's Small, Medium, and Corporate. Think the M side of SMB and up, these are for established organizations with at least 100 seats. They will make zero sense in smaller orgs without some serious diligence in a hard niche.
These are NOT for home users, anyone that thinks so is... misguided. These are useless for home users UNLESS the home user wants to have a machine in the cloud that doesn't crash... ever. Built in time machine style backups... And the ability to record actions based on triggers to catch the kids doing stupid things after the fact. (Windows 365 / VDI is magic in the compliance space people!)
Now, all that being said... these are NOT dead on arrival. They are secured, validated, and trust-able endpoints that DO NOT REQUIRE MANAGEMENT that provide an RDP endpoint to get to Windows 365 or Azure VDI.
There are valid use cases for them, for example... Windows 365 endpoints with Quickbooks On premises installed on them, that are then in turn hooked to a Windows VM in Azure to run the server side components. These devices have superior Intune connectivity to easily manage the entire user experience into and out of any Microsoft virtual environment.
The thing that's sticking in everyone's craw, is the knowledge that this solution is utterly temporary (QB on premises is dead in a year or two, and most LOB applications are going to the cloud as well) and that if you're going to support an end user's device, you may as well only support ONE OF THEM, and just have the endpoint itself do the lifting and forego all the additional expense of the cloud hosted environment.
In the same breath Microsoft was talking about Windows 365 Link they were also unveiling upgraded Intune functionality that drastically extends and accelerates Intune's application publishing abilities. Which again, further extends our ability to manage endpoints correctly, and eliminate these duplicate devices.
But, again these aren't "dead", they do have value. But the value is in specific niches where you need an endpoint device that can be trusted, but doesn't require technical support, or management. Microsoft releasing their own also makes sense against the link I posted above... that Beelink IS NOT TRUST-ABLE! Microsoft's endpoint is... an immutable, trust-able device, has value... but again within its niche.
P.S. There's another related product that was announced...
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/local Let this one sink in...
