Buty Windows 10 Cloud has actually very little to do with the cloud, think of it as a simplified Windows RT. Earlier on it was rumored already that Microsoft is planning to launch another version of Windows called Windows 10 Cloud.
Microsoft refused to comment, the rumors pointed to a heavily restricted version of the operating system aimed at competing with Chromebooks at the low-end of the market. Being early in development, there’s not really much to see at this point in time, in fact, Windows 10 Cloud is identical to other versions of Windows as far as the user interface is concerned. The biggest, and perhaps only notable thing you will notice exploring Windows 10 Cloud is that it will not run desktop applications.
Speculation points towards the idea that this version of Windows is the resurrection of the Windows RT concept. One of the key differences however with this is that Windows 10 cloud is capable of running on both ARM based devices and traditional x86 Intel based devices reports mspoweruser.com:
An early version of Windows 10 Cloud has been leaked online which gives us a tiny glimpse at what Microsoft is cooking up at Redmond. An ISO of a Windows 10 Cloud build was leaked by Twitter user @adguard, which you can actually install today. Needless to say, we wouldn’t recommend installing it on an actual machine, so make sure to install it on a virtual machine instead.
What is quite interesting, however, is that you can actually download some Win32 apps from the Windows Store. These Win32 apps are in the Windows Store via Microsoft’s own Desktop App Converter that allows developers to bring their Win32 apps to the Windows Store but they are still being executed as a Win32 app behind the scenes. Therefore, you can’t actually run Win32 apps that you downloaded from the Windows Store.
As this is just an early version of Windows 10 Cloud, I don’t think it would be ideal to claim that Windows 10 Cloud won’t allow users to run Win32 apps that were downloaded from the Windows Store. It’s possible Microsoft will allow this to happen in the near-future, but we’ll have to wait and see until Microsoft officially releases this new version of Windows 10.
Windows 10 Cloud could be a very interesting version of Windows, to be honest. Windows 10 Cloud seems like Microsoft’s second take on Windows RT, which didn’t really succeed due to the Windows Store not having a lot of useful and powerful apps back then. In the case of the new Windows Store and the Universal Windows Platform, the story isn’t much different either — consumers, especially power users, would still want to be able to run the classic Win32 apps on their PC — even if they are from the Windows Store.
However, Windows 10 Cloud may allow Microsoft to compete with Google’s Chromebooks by introducing cheaper Windows 10 devices while offering good performance and a smooth user experience.
