"The world of mousing around and keyboarding around and typing will feel as alien as it does to Gen Z to use DOS." So says David Weston, Corporate Vice President of Enterprise and OS Security at Microsoft about the future of Windows. How so, exactly? AI, of course! Oh and FYI, unlimited compute thanks to quantum will arrive within five years. Yeah, really.
Weston doesn't put a precise time frame on the demise of ye olde rodent and pecking board. But his comments come in a new video posted on Microsoft's official Windows YouTube channel titled, "Microsoft Windows 2030 Vision." Could the mouse and keyboard really be dead that fast?
According to Weston, this brave new human-machine paradigm will be possible thanks to AI. "I think we will do less with our eyes and more talking to our computers," he says, "it will be a much more natural form of communication."
We'll also be able to ask our PCs to do much more sophisticated things, like manage security, which is Weston's area of expertise at Microsoft.
"In five years, I strongly believe you'll be able to be hire a security expert, what's actually under the hood will be an AI agent. But the way you interact with it will be a lot like you do with humans today," he explains. You'll talk to this AI agent on Teams, send emails, set tasks and so on.
That will allow small and medium sized businesses to access a level of security services that are only currently viable for large enterprises.
More generally, Weston sees this AI revolution taking the tedium out of our working lives and empowering us all to focus on the fun and rewarding stuff. That will everyone to do, "less of the toil work, the work we don't love today, and allow them to focus on what humans are good at: Ideation, creativity, vision, connecting with other humans on what products are necessary."
As if that wasn't enough, Weston drops another bomb. In setting out his predictions for the major trends over the next five years, he reckons, "we will have unlimited compute in the form of quantum."
For Weston, the main implication is the impact on security and encryption. But unlimited compute in just five years? That's quite the claim and doesn't necessarily square with the view of other experts, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
As it happens, that won't actually impact how Weston sees the basic tenets of security. Instead, he thinks the fundamentals stay the same. That means really simple things like updating to the latest security patch and rotating your passwords. "The basics still stop 98% of attacks. 20 years ago that was true, 20 years before that was true," he says. And he doesn't see that changing.
It will be interesting to see how accurate Weston proves to be. You could say reports of the death of the keyboard and mouse have been greatly exaggerated often enough in the past. Whether it's plain old touch screens, VR and hand gestures, or even brain implants, plenty of technologies have been mooted as the next big thing in PC control interfaces.
But here we are in 2025 and it's still all about keyboard and mouse. Or maybe trackpad if you're mobile. It will certainly be interesting to see exactly what technologies Microsoft rolls out in this regard between now and 2030. But I can't help feeling that reality won't quite match Weston's vision.
If nothing else, speaking to a computer isn't necessarily more frictionless and lower effort than typing, never mind the privacy and interpersonal etiquette around the idea of everyone in open-plan offices barking into their PCs. Watch this space, but I'm betting I'll still be bashing away ineffectually, if manually, in 2030.
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