Windows 8 user scenario 2: Hybrid Model – Part Cloud Part Hard disk

So there has been a lot of talk recently about the next version of Windows going to the cloud and how great that would be.

I was talking to my buddy yesterday and he reminded me that a lot of people wouldn’t want all their documents on some hard drive in some data center somewhere far away.

In many ways, the loss of a physical hard drive that you can see and touch would be a dificult thing for a lot of end users to handle and accept.

While I personally wouldn’t mind it, I can see and understand the value to being able to (relatively) keep your content secure.

To that end, here’s my second use case for Windows 8.

1. User sits down in front of their computer
2. They boot up PC in less than 10 seconds
3. The screen shows 3 fields
   1. Username
   2. Password
   3. Domain
4. The Domain field would have both Cloud environments (defined by IP addresses) and a local hard drive choice as well.
5. The catch is that even the hard drive “local” choice would be a VM as well.
6. The user could then decided whether to log into the cloud or log into the drive.

Here’s the best part of that scenario.

Since this would be part of the transition process to get to the cloud, the footprint of the PC would be …well as small as this

Something you could put in your pocket and take from place to place if you needed to.

You wouldn’t need a huge form factor because all the information would be contained either on the tiny drive or the cloud.

This would be the best of both worlds. Portability and security all in one. No more huge Dell PC cases. Just a tiny case.

In the next posts, I will talk about the scenario for monitors and keyboards.

What do you guys and gals think?