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What Will The Expanding World of ChromeOS Mean For Windows?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Hewlett-Packard is the latest PC manufacturer to jump into the Chromebook game, whipping the curtain back from a 14-inch device loaded with Google's Chrome OS. Powered by a dual-core Intel Celeron processor, and touting roughly 4.25 hours of battery life, the HP Pavilion Chromebook follows in the footsteps of other Chromebooks released by Acer and Samsung over the past few months. While these manufacturers continue to produce devices loaded with Windows, the growth of Chrome OS could spark some worry among Microsoft executives, who have become used to their hardware partners operating as Windows-only shops. But is Chrome OS a true threat to Windows, or just a way for manufacturers to gain some additional leverage in negotiating with Microsoft over licensing fees and other matters?"
Shame that it's in a creepy, Google-centric way. Goodbye, last vestiges of privacy!
(also, first post)
For the reasons stated in the summary, from the manufacturer's standpoint it just doesn't matter. The effort to port ChromeOS, measured in engineer hours, could easily be paid for by a 50 cent drop in the per laptop licensing fee for Windows. It's a good gamble. It's a win either way.
Personally though, a Nexus 10, with all those pretty pixels, and a bluetooth keyboard seems to fill this niche better than anything I've seen with a hinge.
Windows 8 is the true threat to windows.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Introducing the new Microsoft LiveBook. Boots right in to Microsoft's cloud-based OS. Skydrive, Skype, Office365, Bing search, Hotmail. Coming your way in 2015 or sooner.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
It seems that Chromebooks are trying to slide into the market slot that Netbooks are currently vacating. I'm not entirely sure I understand what's going on there, netbooks were well refined products that seem to have gone out of favour and everyone is designing Chromebooks from scratch. Considering these are effectively the new dumb terminals, you'd have thought they could've done better than a Celeron and 4.25 hours of battery life - netbooks were rather more capable than Chromebooks appears to be, cost about the same and had far superior battery life.
Or has everyone (finally) just realised that 10" is really not that comfortable a form factor?
Really? And compared to your average tablet, how does the Celeron fare? The Chromebook's niche is not that of a PC. Hell, it's not even like that of a traditional notebook. Given that, the Celeron processor is more than up to the task.
Uh, no. Most people care about having shiny baubles, and them being cheap. They may "claim" to care about privacy, but in practice, they give it up pretty freely.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
Who cares? CPU isn't the limiting factor on either a tablet or a chromebook. The lack of productivity software is.
And revenue down 20% overall...
In North America, Chromebooks are largely an education (K12) play. The "traditional" OEMs are seeing tremendous market share erosion to iPads in schools - So this provides them with something to sell. The schools struggle with iPads because they're expensive (next to no edu-discounting from Apple), fragile, difficult to manage and are theft targets. It's also difficult to create content (such as writing and essay) on iPad.
"because obviously there is no such thing as software that is only able to run on Windows"
If they don't port it, it doesn't run, and their commercial decision isn't a turin machine. There *is* such a thing as software that can only run on Windows.
I can't for the life of me figure out how you'd mix a keyboard and a touch screen and have that make sense.
Ergonomically, it would suck to have to reach up to your monitor from typing ... it would look like hitting the carriage return on an old typewriter or something. :-P
On my desk, my monitor is about a foot or more behind my keyboard, I'd need to lean forward to even touch it.
Either I'm suffering from a large lack of imagination, or all of these people clamoring for a keyboard and a touch screen haven't thought this through. It seems more like you'd get a bad compromise of both.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Microsoft killed the netbook, Tablets simply are immune to Windows.
I think this is one of the most insightful comments here.
Microsoft went out of their way to make sure the netbook experience sucked, thus it's no surprise the netbook market has shrunk considerably.
Fortunately, Microsoft has not been able to sabotage the tablet market.