The Desktop is Dead. Long Live the Desktop!

For a long time, the terms desktop and desktop PC have been used interchangeably -Not anymore. Because given the way things are going, the desktop will gain precedence over the desktop PC. Here's why.

At the end of the day, most users want to access their own personalized desktop with their favorite apps. It doesn't matter whether these are served from a local PC, or over the network, or over the Internet. So long as they're available, customizable, and provide a smooth experience, the user doesn't really care.

Several technologies are making this possible. The most obvious one is the combination of powerful mobile devices like tablets and smartphones with high-speed connectivity, and apps being served from the Cloud. Increasingly users are beginning to use these devices for a mix of personal and official work, which were earlier done on either a desktop PC, or even a laptop with a data card -social networking, email, reading important documents, web browsing, booking/checking flights, just to name a few. In this case, the users are more worried about their apps and personalized devices than a desktop.

Technologies like VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), and application virtualization eliminate the need to have a powerful desktop at the front-end. For VDI, all you need is a thin client or a lightweight PC at the front-end, and your desktop environment is served to you over the network or a web browser, so it even becomes device independent. The latter enhances the former by allowing your applications to follow you wherever you go.

Now the good news. Most of these technologies are already here. There's Novatium's hybrid desktop, which is an Atom based PC at the front-end with a powerful Cloud based app portfolio at the back-end that gives you a customized desktop on a pay-per-use basis. There's also nComputing, which converts a single PC into multiple PCs using hardware virtualization. VMware recently announced several exciting new technologies that will virtualize your Android based smartphone and create a separate workspace for your official apps, and even make your Windows apps run on HTML5 supported devices. Recently, even MS introduced Windows 8 Developer Preview, with support for mobile, touch based devices.

Excited? We sure were while writing about all these technologies.

So what happens to the humble desktop PC? Will it disappear? Not really, because there's a huge legacy of client/server applications that a lot of companies are using. It can't be replaced overnight, but changes will happen. Moreover, the desktop PC is being increasingly looked as a powerful device for content creation, while newer devices are emerging to consume that content.