Fabric - a full online experience?

Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Stockholm is just about to start. The Fabric platform is evolving and we see even more online experiences coming to the platform.

But can we go full online now and skip the desktop applications?

TL:DR;

Not really - as always it depends on the needs and requirements you have to develop your analytics platform. The Power BI desktop application is way to powerful to move 100% to the web. The other artefacts and items in Fabric could be a 100% online experience depending on the needs and way of working.

Engineering development can be 100% online

We have the vscode.dev integration when working with and developing Notebooks. This gives us capabilities to use watchers, debug the code with breakpoints and get error messages directly in a downscaled VS Code in the browser.

With the Fabric items for data engineering being fully manageable within the browser and this new vs code implementation, I believe we could remove the desktop applications and work fully on the browser.

Real-Time Intelligence development

This service suite from Microsoft Fabric is online only.

The entire list of items from Real-Time Intelligence are deployed to be used from a browser only. We can fully manage the entire data flow from source to visualisation from the web and ONLY from the web.

I know we can use VS Code and other tools to deploy Real-Time Intelligence artefacts. Everything you can do by a desktop tool, you can also do from the web, plus a whole lot more.

Power BI and analytics development

This is the catch - even though we have a Power BI experience for the web, there is still a need for some desktop tools and thus, the Power BI desktop application is still a must have.

First of all, the development of a Power BI report with visuals, calculations and UX is way easier on the desktop application than in the browser - and we also have a bunch of features in desktop which still needs to be (or perhaps will never be) available in the web.

With the external tools like Tabular Editor, DAX formatter, Power BI documenter etc, we will still need the desktop application for quite a while now.

I don't think we will ever see a full pledged version of Power BI for the web, and we don't need to. The desktop version is too powerful to move to the web. And the developers using the application has no need or desire to move.

Where are we going?

I truly believe we see a trend in a more web based experience for Microsoft Fabric, even though a fully web based experience is something we will not get in the near future - if ever.

And we don't need it. The current tools and functionality is working really well with the current web and desktop applications around Fabric.

My personal thoughts on this, is that the product groups behind the Microsoft Fabric product are discussing the web vs desktop experience and trying to find a good balance. Perhaps we will see even more functionality move to the web in the future.