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Presumably a cloudy future where literally everything everyone does is owned, controlled, processed and analysed by Google, by any chance? Gee thanks. Or you could interoperate this as a way to make Chromebooks marginally more useful and saleable, particularly to businesses that don't want to (or can't) drop dependence on MS Office and 'other legacy apps'.

There could potentially be some longer term performance benefits however... MS and Google has been pushing more and more use of browser based office applications, but as far as I'm aware they still process data (slowly and inefficiently) on the local client. You just can't open a stonkingly massive and complex Excel model in the online application. But if the file is already in the cloud (via Drive, One-Drive or SharePoint etc.) and the software interface is already in the browser, why not use much more massive cloud processing power behind the scenes, to deliver something more capable than the local hardware or native application? That seems to be the missing link, unless I'm misunderstanding something?

I find Google Docs to be better than browser based word.

I've not used either of their spreadsheet apps for anything other than basic tables with calculations, no complex formulas or lookups, although I'm sure they've improved over the last few years

RAS is well-regarded but has never rivaled the market share of application-publishing rivals Citrix and VMware, both of which are completely capable of bringing Windows apps to Chromebooks with plug-ins.

I thought that RAS offloads even more rendering to the server so that a plugin, which will essentially need to implement RDP in the browser, isn't strictly necessary. Licensing fees for any large install will be key to market acceptance,

As usual, mouthpieces blabbering on current trends while completely ignoring how conditions have changed.

I've always been interested in working from home, that's not new. Since the beginning of office work, in IT or otherwise, the norm has always been you go to the office and work at a desk, with your colleagues. Over time, the Internet was born, then VPNs, and sometimes you could work for a boss who didn't break out in hives when you suggested that you could do part of your job from home.

Today however, companies have been brutally pushed into a world where everybody is working from home, and whether or not they broke out in hives, bosses have found that, yes, their company can actually function like that (for those companies that could do so, obviously).

That is a sea change in that now, bosses can no longer break out in hives when you say that you can do that from home. You did it before and it worked out fine. So now we can envision a world where you'll be at the office for meetings, for greeting certain customers or consultants, and work from home the rest of the time.

We'll all see how this works out, but nobody is going to have "works from home" in their contract. It will likely remain a possibility, apparently big companies are seriously planning it, but we will all have days at the office again.

I'm expecting that a non trivial % of desk jobs currently WFH will just continue this way and future 'in the office' time happens only when there's a reason to travel.

There's a LOT of expensive office space sitting mostly empty at the moment. In the last three months we've identified what works and more importantly what doesn't work in WFH setting, sensible senior management by now should be generating a nice set of figures showing how much overhead they could save if the office space shrank to match.

How this pans out over time for social interactions is guesswork, but I'd hazard that as millions do not miss spending hours on crowded transport at both ends of a working day they may now venture out more often mid-week.

I looked at RAS as a possible alternative after the death of vWorkspace, but didn't find it that compelling. From memory, the cost of the annual licensing subscription made it a non starter. For smaller solutions, RDS with RD gateway is acceptable. For larger solutions Citrix CVAD is still the way to go.

My sole experience of Chromebooks was when an Administrator where I work bought ten of them for some staff. Our department (thankfully not me) was tasked with trying to deploy these damn machines using our existing, Windows based infrastructure. The Administrator had assumed they were just cheap PCs, so Windows 10 would run fine on them.

Not sure what happened to those machines, but I do know that as a result of that, the previous guidance our department had issued about asking IT to purchase computing equipment, rather than going through other departments became a rule, even to the point of of writing to our suppliers telling them who is authorised to purchase from them.

How is this better then a Stinkpad with a native OS, and local App installs again?