How to lie with data: A satirical take on data misrepresentation
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With the start of a new year, it is always a valuable moment to reflect on what the previous year has brought, while also looking ahead to the opportunities that lie ahead. For a non-profit initiative like GO-EUC, this reflection is essential. Understanding what worked well, and where there is room for improvement helps ensure the continued delivery of relevant, high-quality content for the community. With that in mind, this article looks back at what was accomplished in 2025 and outlines the focus and ambitions of GO-EUC for 2026.
What happened in 2025?
Before diving into the specifics of GO-EUC, it is worth looking at 2025 from a broader End-User Computing (EUC) perspective. From our viewpoint, it was a relatively steady year. The shift toward cloud-first, and increasingly cloud-native, workspaces continued, with Microsoft further pushing solutions such as Intune, Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop into the market, gaining wider adoption across organisations.
At the same time, 2025 delivered a notable surprise. Microsoft announced the introduction of on-premises support for Azure Virtual Desktop, extending beyond Azure Local. While cloud-based workspaces continue to be adopted at pace, this move clearly highlighted that the need for on-premises solutions has not disappeared. Instead, it reinforced a familiar reality within EUC: organisations continue to require flexibility, balancing cloud innovation with local control depending on use case, costs, compliance, and operational requirements.
The end of Windows 10
As we look back on 2025, one milestone stands out as a defining moment across the end-user computing landscape: Windows 10 reached its official end of support on October 14, 2025. After more than a decade as the backbone of both consumer and enterprise PCs, Microsoft’s most widely deployed desktop operating system formally exited its support lifecycle, a shift with clear operational and strategic implications for organisations everywhere.
With that October deadline firmly on the horizon, 2025 began for many organisations as a year of finalizing preparations. Planning the move to Windows 11 became a priority, driven by security, compliance, and long-term support considerations. In response, GO-EUC delivered an up-to-date analysis of the impact of this transition, helping organisations better understand what to expect while offering additional insights to support well-informed Virtual Desktop migration decisions.
The rise of AI & Agents
As 2025 progressed, another development became increasingly difficult to ignore: the growing presence of AI and intelligent agents within End-User Computing environments. What initially appeared as isolated ‘Shadow AI’ experiments gradually evolved into a broader shift in how organisations approached automation, user assistance, and operational efficiency. Across enterprises of all sizes, AI-driven capabilities, ranging from generative assistants to task-orchestrating agents, moved beyond proof-of-concept stages and slowly into everyday use, reshaping expectations around productivity and support.
With this momentum building, 2025 became less about deciding whether to adopt AI and more about determining how to do so responsibly. Considerations around governance, security, data residency, and user experience moved to the forefront, requiring IT teams to establish clear and practical adoption strategies that balanced innovation with control. While GO-EUC did not conduct dedicated research specifically focused on AI within EUC during this period, the topic remained impossible to overlook. Early experiments explored how AI could assist in analysing collected performance and experience data, highlighting its potential role as a complementary capability rather than a standalone solution.
The need for Digital User Experience (DEX)
The importance of Digital User Experience (DEX) became increasingly clear across end-user computing environments. As organisations continued to rely on a growing mix of physical devices, virtual desktops, and cloud-based applications, availability alone was no longer sufficient. The focus shifted toward how these environments actually performed for end users, and how consistently that experience could be delivered across different platforms and usage scenarios.
This emphasis on DEX highlighted a familiar challenge: while infrastructure and platform metrics were widely available, they often failed to reflect the experience perceived by the user. Latency, responsiveness, and application behaviour became central discussion points, particularly as hybrid and remote work models continued to mature. In response, 2025 saw organisations place greater value on objective and repeatable methods for measuring user experience. In the first half of the year, a new benchmarking initiative was announced: OBUX, a non-profit initiative focused on quantifying Digital User Experience in a consistent and comparable way. GO-EUC embraced developments like this and began incorporating OBUX into its toolset, making it likely that 2026 will see an increase in OBUX-based research and insights shared with the community.
A look back for GO-EUC
At GO-EUC, we believe in data. One of our internal data points for measuring performance is the number of publications per year. When planning for the year began in late 2024, the objective was straightforward: publish at least one article per month. This goal was intentionally simple and easily measurable, allowing us to focus on the substance rather than the metric itself.
Did GO-EUC hit that target? Not exactly.
One month was skipped during the summer holiday period, and September did not see a publication either. That said, October compensated with two articles, resulting in a total of 11 publications in 2025, compared to 12 in 2024.
From a purely numerical perspective, this represents a slight decrease. However, at GO-EUC, numbers are only the starting point.
Data matters, but context matters more.
While publication frequency is an easy metric to track, it is far from the most important one. GO-EUC has always placed a significantly higher value on depth, accuracy, and technical rigour than on output volume. Increasing publication frequency without compromising quality remains challenging, particularly given the growing complexity of the topics being explored.
The research conducted for GO-EUC articles is not lightweight. It involves controlled testing, repeated measurements, tooling development, data validation, and peer review. As topics become more specialised and complex, the time required per publication increases accordingly. Simply publishing “more” is not always realistic, nor do we believe it is desirable.
Looking ahead to 2026, our ambition remains unchanged: to aim for at least one publication per month. At the same time, these expectations are grounded in reality. GO-EUC is a community-driven initiative, and all research is conducted in personal time, time that often competes with family, friends, and professional responsibilities. Our work continues to be a labour of love, driven by curiosity rather than obligation.
Growth in members
To deliver a steady stream of valuable research, a strong and reliable foundation of contributors is essential. Throughout 2025, one of GO-EUC’s key goals was to continue strengthening this foundation by welcoming new members who bring both expertise and a shared commitment to community-driven knowledge. Against that backdrop, it was a great addition to see Edwin de Bruin and Alyn Peden join GO-EUC during the year.
Their involvement further broadened the collective expertise within GO-EUC, strengthening coverage across VMware, Omnissa, and Azure environments, including Azure Local. This expansion not only increased technical depth but also reinforced GO-EUC’s ability to approach research topics from multiple perspectives.
To complement this growth, GO-EUC also began experimenting with an affiliate program. This initiative allows industry experts to contribute to specific research efforts without the long-term commitment required of full membership. It provides additional flexibility while maintaining quality and independence, an approach that will be explored in more detail in the next chapter.
Increase the GO-EUC visibility in the community
As a non-profit organisation, increasing the visibility of the platform within the community remains essential to ensure that the value delivered by GO-EUC is widely understood and accessible. While overall activity on the website saw a slight decrease during the year, GO-EUC’s presence across community and industry events continued to grow.
Throughout 2025, GO-EUC remained actively involved in many of the key events within the end-user computing space, including E2EVC, Experts Live, AVD TechFest, and others. These events provided valuable opportunities to engage directly with the community, share research outcomes, and exchange experiences with peers, reinforcing GO-EUC’s role as an independent and community-driven platform within the EUC ecosystem.
The sponsor program
Running GO-EUC relies on the continued support of partners who believe in independent, community-driven research. In 2025, this support was reaffirmed as our long-term sponsor LoadGen extended its commitment and continued proudly as GO-EUC’s primary sponsor.
The year also marked an important new milestone, with ControlUp joining as a sponsor. This addition is particularly exciting, as it broadens the capabilities available within the GO-EUC ecosystem and opens up new opportunities for deeper insights and collaboration. A sincere thank you to both LoadGen and ControlUp for their trust in GO-EUC and their continued belief in the value of the GO-EUC community.
2026, A leap forward
Delivering the in-depth research that GO-EUC is known for requires significant time, coordination, and collaboration. For that reason, one of the key goals for the coming year is to further streamline the research process. This will be achieved through improvements in planning and roadmap alignment, a more structured testing strategy, and the definition of clear data lake standards to ensure consistency and repeatability across research efforts.
To further increase community involvement, plans are in place to officially launch the affiliate program in 2026. As briefly outlined earlier, this initiative enables industry experts to contribute to specific research topics without the long-term commitment required of full membership. In the coming months, more details will be shared regarding participation requirements and the sign-up process.
As GO-EUC continues to grow and deliver high-quality, independent content, the ambition for 2026 is to welcome two additional sponsors alongside existing partners LoadGen and ControlUp. Expanding sponsor support will allow GO-EUC to further innovate within its research initiatives and increase overall visibility within the EUC community. Organisations interested in supporting GO-EUC are encouraged to reach out via info[at]go-euc.com to start the conversation.
From an innovation perspective, there are also clear plans to expand the way research is delivered. While previous years primarily focused on publishing results and insights, future initiatives will introduce more interactive formats aimed at actively involving the community. This approach is intended not only to share findings, but also to create opportunities for engagement, discussion, and collaborative knowledge creation.
Closing words
In closing, our thanks go out to our readers.
Your readership is the sole reason GO-EUC (still) exists. We see our articles being read and shared on social media, discussed and debated openly, and, just as importantly, challenged when conclusions are unclear or when mistakes slip through. That feedback loop is invaluable to us and helps keep GO-EUC honest and grounded in reality. Looking ahead to 2026, our goal remains unchanged: to continue publishing relevant, in-depth technical publications that (hopefully) contribute meaningfully to the EUC community. We also look forward to meeting more of you in person at EUC events throughout the year. Conversations that start in articles often become far more interesting face-to-face, and, just as often, those in-person discussions become the starting point for new articles.
So, in closing, our call to action to you, our readers, is simple: please keep sending research ideas and questions. Keep challenging our results, conclusions, and assumptions. And please keep pointing out mistakes when they happen, because they inevitably will. Our excuse? We are only human. With that, GO-EUC looks forward to another year of learning, testing, debating, and improving, together.
Photo by Jamie Fenn on Unsplash
