For years, I’ve been watching the slow evening up of classic Windows PCs to cloud-based Windows and Office services. Sure, you can still buy a PC with Windows on it, but you’re not really “buying” Windows as much as renting it. 

Windows cloud PCs have gone from Microsoft’s side project to the centerpiece of its post‑Windows‑10 strategy. But the story in 2026 is less “death of the PC” and more “merger of PC, cloud, and AI under Microsoft’s terms.” Today, the most interesting question is not whether Windows moves to the cloud, but how much local control users are willing to surrender in exchange for AI‑infused desktops.

For the longest time, Microsoft had planned on the Windows 365 Cloud PC to shift users from a PC‑centric world to Desktop‑as‑a‑Service, with Windows 11 acting as the on‑ramp. Microsoft’s own internal slideware later made that explicit: the plan is to “move Windows 11 increasingly to the cloud…to enable a full Windows operating system streamed from the cloud to any device.” What started as the Business and Enterprise editions of Windows 365, running on Azure with per‑user monthly pricing in the $30-to-$60 range, has since been productized and polished as if it were the “real” Windows roadmap rather than a side hustle.

Other harbingers included Windows 365 Boot, which bypassed the local operating system entirely and dropped you straight into a personalized cloud desktop on shared or BYOD hardware. And Windows 365 Switch blurs the boundary between local and hosted sessions, turning a cloud PC into “just another desktop.” 

At the same time, Windows App enables you to run Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, Remote Desktop Services, and remote PCs from, well, pretty much any computing device. Specifically, you can use Windows App to run Windows on Macs, iPhones, iPads, other Windows machines, even in web browsers. That last means you can now run Windows on Linux-powered PCs, Chromebooks, and Android phones and tablets. 

Heck, you can even run Windows using a Meta Quest VR headset! 

A funny thing happened on the way to this cloud-based subscription service. AI came along. Microsoft, which has gone whole-hog into AI — if I see one more CoPilot tie-in, I’m going to scream — decided that AI PCs would be the future. It’s wrong.

As Kevin Terwilliger, Dell’s head of product, said of PC customers, “They’re not buying based on AI. I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them.” (Ya think?) 

That’s not to say people aren’t using AI. They are. But, no one’s managed to sell them yet on the idea that Agentic AI PCs, even with the special sauce of Neural Processing Units (NPUs), Intel Panther Lake chips, and super-duper GPUs. Most analysts, and at least one cranky Computerworld columnist (guess who), think the Copilot+ PC hype needs to end.

Jeff Bezos — Remember him? He knows a thing or two about the cloud — suggested that the PC is never going to be able to deliver the AI goods. Instead, “AI will be in everything,” but compute will be delivered via the cloud. In case you missed it, at the last Ignite conference, Microsoft highlighted its Windows 365 cloud PC concept, with AI agents, not AI PCs.

Going forward, Microsoft will want you not to buy and run your own applications, AI-infused or not, on a PC. They’ll want you to subscribe and run “your” AI-enabled programs on their cloud services. 

This will not be cheap. Today, the bottom-end Windows 365 Cloud PC with 2 virtual CPUs, 4GB RAM, and 64GB of storage will cost you $28 a month. Good luck running Windows 11 on its own, never mind with any application, on 4 gigs of RAM.  The absolute minimum for a useful cloud desktop with 8GB of RAM is $41. Add in AI functionality, an instance of Office, and you’re talking real money. 

For companies, math is being reframed. Instead of comparing Windows 365 to the sunk cost of a once‑every‑five‑years PC purchase, vendors pitch it against the fully burdened price of securing, patching, and managing a distributed fleet in a hybrid‑work world. In that context, a per‑seat cloud desktop subscription stops looking like a weird outlier and just another SKU on the Microsoft subscription treadmill.

I’m old enough to recall the transition from centralized computers you used via a terminal to the locally owned PC revolution. Then, we controlled the “horizontal and the vertical.” The AI-enabled cloud desktop puts Microsoft in charge of the entire application stack and your online identity. 

It might be 2026, but Microsoft’s business model going forward looks a lot like the ones I saw in 1976. Maybe you’re comfortable with that. I’m not. 

Microsoft frames Windows 365 as the sane way to keep corporate data off home PCs shared with kids and games, which is hard to argue with if you are a CSO signing audit reports. But the shift to cloud PCs plus on‑device AI also deepens lock‑in. Sure, you can run Windows 365 from anything, but it runs best when paired with Windows 11 hardware. 

The old Windows desktop is dying. The 2026 twist is that its successor does not live only in Microsoft’s cloud. It also lives on your desk, in your laptop, and in the NPU you did not ask for, all stitched together into a Windows that is becoming less an operating system and more a metered utility. 

Me? You know my bias. If you want control over your privacy, your data, how much you’re paying for compute, and your PC, Linux is the best way forward.