I’ve been recently evaluating a large migration to Office Pro Plus from Office 2013.  One the questions we get asked often is what is the future of windows client.  There are still a large amount of use cases where users prefer to work in a client and not in a web view.  Lets review those cases and talk about the future of clients.

When we talk about web clients, we find there are three types of users.   Users who think that Office web applications are just like gmail and they hate g suite. We have the modern user who prefers to work out of  web browser.  To this user, this change is type of way to access is how they are used to work.  I call this the web generation. The last use case are the heavy users.  They are using large data sets, or either real or imaginary they need the client.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are some use cases that with current technology could not be done in a web client (right now anyway), outlook calendar to 8 delegates, huge data sets in excel etc:

Without a doubt, either now or in the future there will be no more clients.  Applications will be a way of the past in the future and everything will be out of one client, if that is a web browser, teams or something else.

Applications must die.