A slate of contentious issues--social, economic, and technological--will radically alter the business user's computing experience by the end of this decade. Windows XP is the corporate standard desktop and will be for years to come. How employees receive the XP experience, however, will undergo a dramatic shift in as little as two years, whether IT is ready or not. Application and desktop streaming toolsets, robust Web apps, the increasing power

of smartphones, and multiple varieties of desktop virtualization are challenging our basic assumptions about what the terms "computer" and "operating system" mean.

Sure, nearly all of today's corporate computing needs can be met with a 5-year-old Windows XP machine running a core of legacy server-based software plus a few Web applications. The dirty little secret of this status quo is that companies are pouring more money into support and upkeep of these fat-OS boxes than they care to admit, even internally, and CIOs have serious doubts about continuing down this path. One proof point: Windows Vista is a bust in the enterprise. In fact, 82% of the 376 business technology professionals who responded to our InformationWeek Analytics Radical Desktop poll say their organizations will still be running Windows XP as 2010 comes to a close; 19% expect to be using pre-XP desktops, such as Windows 2000 or Windows ME.

Part of the reason for XP's almost unnatural longevity: Until recently, CIOs didn't have a good alternative. Now, however, virtualization is transforming the way IT departments view the data center, and myriad players large and small are looking to extend virtualization strategies to deliver "traditional" desktops to employees in a secure, reliable, and significantly less expensive fashion.

So how radical will the shifts be in two years? From an end-user perspective, the look and feel of applications will be similar, though a virtualized desktop means they'll have less administrative power over corporate PCs. Employees will have a much more convincing argument that they should be allowed to choose their devices, as more Web-based applications are ported to run on multiple platforms.

But those responsible for delivering the desktop to employees should get ready for profound change. We're at the cusp of a shift in thinking, and there will be no "right" answer for the desktop of tomorrow. All organizations will host a mix of computing environments--conventional, virtualized, centralized in-house, and hosted off site. Employees will work from a variety of devices, and the only constant will be demand for 24/7 access to personal and corporate resources via ever more browser-based business applications, not just e-mail. In fact, 72% of our respondents work at companies where users access business apps via smartphones.

On the IT side, we expect to see a surprisingly diverse, confusing, feature-rich smorgasbord of delivery mechanisms for desktops and application suites. Seismic shifts are in the works as a wide variety of vendors maneuver to get that XP desktop in front of employees via a variety of methods, old and new.

Topping the list of justifications for moving away from the traditional fat client-server model is total cost of ownership. Analysts and auditors have been bemoaning the ancillary costs of deploying and maintaining desktops since enterprises started rolling them out. Now, the latest round of cost-cutting driven by high energy prices is finally shaking out the details and raising both green awareness and a realization of the bottom-line financial impact of maintaining the support staff to keep depreciated PCs up, running, and even marginally secure.

Roughly one-fifth of our respondents have a fully loaded annual support cost greater than $1,000 per desktop, so it's not surprising that when we asked what would drive them to make a drastic change, the top response was cutting costs. Of course, this is the argument that mainframe pundits put forth during the initial rush to distributed computing, and it's unlikely CIOs will be fooled twice. Before moving to a cloud or virtualized model, all the companies we spoke with will do exhaustive TCO analysis, so vendors should get their spreadsheets in order.

Of course, most of the savings comes from reduced staffing costs, never something IT wants to hear.