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Will Chromebooks Someday Threaten Windows? (itworld.com)
"There are signs that Chromebooks are a bigger long-term threat to Microsoft than you might imagine," reports ITWorld, arguing that "long term, they'll likely be a serious competitor."
The reason? Chromebooks sell big in education. They've unseated the Mac in schools. Two years ago, for the first time, Chromebooks outsold Macs in schools. Schools are a great market for Google, but Chromebooks are also Trojan horses. Children and teens use them for schoolwork and more. And when they get Chromebooks, they also get free subscriptions to Google's G suite of apps. If kids grow up using G Suite and Chromebooks, there's a reasonable chance they'll use them when they get older.
Where I live, in Cambridge, Mass., the public Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School gives out free Chromebooks to every one of the more than 2,000 teens in the school, in a bid to close the digital divide between families who can afford to buy computers for their children and those who can't... Cambridge isn't unique. According to a 2017 article in The New York Times, "More than half the nation's primary- and secondary-school students -- more than 30 million children -- use Google education apps like Gmail and Docs... And Chromebooks, Google-powered laptops that initially struggled to find a purpose, are now a powerhouse in America's schools. Today they account for more than half the mobile devices shipped to schools...."
When students graduate, Google makes it easy for them to move all their mail and documents from their school accounts to their personal accounts. And schools sometimes even act as inadvertent salespeople for Google. The Times reports that some schools tell graduating seniors to move all their documents from their school to their personal accounts... The upshot of all this? Windows hardware continues to rule in enterprises. But Chromebooks may one day prove a serious competitor, as students make their way into the workforce.
Where I live, in Cambridge, Mass., the public Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School gives out free Chromebooks to every one of the more than 2,000 teens in the school, in a bid to close the digital divide between families who can afford to buy computers for their children and those who can't... Cambridge isn't unique. According to a 2017 article in The New York Times, "More than half the nation's primary- and secondary-school students -- more than 30 million children -- use Google education apps like Gmail and Docs... And Chromebooks, Google-powered laptops that initially struggled to find a purpose, are now a powerhouse in America's schools. Today they account for more than half the mobile devices shipped to schools...."
When students graduate, Google makes it easy for them to move all their mail and documents from their school accounts to their personal accounts. And schools sometimes even act as inadvertent salespeople for Google. The Times reports that some schools tell graduating seniors to move all their documents from their school to their personal accounts... The upshot of all this? Windows hardware continues to rule in enterprises. But Chromebooks may one day prove a serious competitor, as students make their way into the workforce.
As if kids fresh out of school have any power to challenge the status quo of corporate IT
I've lived the past 10 years in both London and then in Copenhagen. Maybe it's a US versus EU thing, but I've never come across a single person using a Chromebook, and I'm around tech types all week. So maybe... 0% chance?
For the last 15 years, everyone and his dog, including Microsoft themselves, have been foreseeing the death of the desktop computer because of the hip media consumption device du jour. It's not going to happen anytime soon, because those things have a tendency to suck when one tries to get some work done with them.
We all know that the cloud mentally mutilates the mind beyond hope of regeneration.
I work in a offices that is transitioning to "Cloud based apps". Read Google Docs and dropbox style filesharing.
It can take upwords of a minute for a 20 page document to "load". You dare not load more than a few at once lets the browser eat so much memory it heads out to virtual. At that point, you may as well re-start the machine.
The "features" available on such software -- on most apps, web or mobile in general -- would have been a miserable excuse of a featureset back in 1998, let alone 2018.
What exactly was wrong with a fast, fully featured, files on your drive executable I will never understand. Maybe in a decade or so a new generation will get tired of javascript black holes and unresponsive, lag ridden cloud-based "software" and actually think about going back to the idea of a PC as a fast, responsive, personal computer on which powerful software can actually be run.
But most people have moved on to tiny screens with very high resolutions already. A docking station clamshell [*] might outsell both.
It really irks me almost all the sites have gone to optimizing their site for the 5 inch screen. I visit banking sites and they show the same minimal, flat, inscrutable icons (plus inside a circle, pencil, matrix, ham sandwich, kebab) without any indication or explanation on 24 inch screens.
[*] I define docking station clamshell as a chromebook formfactor clamshell, with keyboard, trackpad and a high resolution screen. It will have niche or a port where one can snap in or slide in the regular mobile phone. It will connect to the USB port, charge the phone. Phone takes care of all connectivity and computation. The clamshell is simply a convenient additional display keyboard mouse extension. One can think of docking pads too. You carry the phone everywhere, depending on the situation you connect to the larger screen.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sorry, but what graphics software your kid makes doodles in isn't going to replace Photoshop.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I work in higher ed (community/state college with only a few 4yr programs) and we were discussing G vs MS the other day. K-12 in my area also uses G and Chromebooks. We are a MS shop with no G usage other than installing Chrome on PCs. How do we best prepare our students in general? (not specific majors or trade programs)
Do we stick with MS to compliment their G suite knowledge gained in K-12? Do we switch to G to match what they are learning in K-12. Do we let the students use both and decide? Do we try to match what the universities are using to prepare transferring students?
More and more about companies choosing the GSuite over Microsoft. It is big companies as well as small. My stance was that we should at least offer some chrome devices in labs and public areas to gauge student interest.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Still no Chromebook sales figures? Notice how no Chromebook maker is screaming of sales success?
I can tell you that trailing year sales of Samsung tablets are 23.3 million units, around 100+ million Android tablets in total.
The last number revealed was 2014..... 5.3 million units.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/749890/worldwide-chromebook-unit-shipments/
Smell the flop? Can we have a proper tablet treatment for Android yet?
Since Microsoft (Win10) started spying on it's users the question is whether Google's spying is any worse.
Without good legislation these large (US) companies will only increase their snooping, especially children that have no choice need to be protected against any harvesting of their data.
See my sig.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Remember when it was the Mac that was going to threaten Microsoft Windows dominance because they were often found in schools? Yeah. Well, it didn't exactly happen. Macs made some gains, from about 4% to 12% today, but it was more from being good computers not OS addictions.
The major fallacy is that there is more to business computing than just Microsoft Office. In fact, there is a lot more. Most jobs require their employees to learn and utilize a small host of different applications. Many of those are developed in-house. Many, many of those applications simply don't exist on other platforms, or at least not nearly to the same quality. If your software that you use doesn't exist on a rival platform, or you would have to spend lots and lots of money training and migrating over to another program, then why would you do that?
I mean, for gawd sake, companies -lots and lots of companies- are still using Oricle. You think they are going to switch to Chromebooks? You are insane.
they are different things for different uses... they are about as much of a threat to each other as oranges are a threat to bananas
Or Chrome gaming pcs. Or Chrome video editors. Chrome will not take the high end, just like "real" Linux has failed too. I've seen "Linux on the desktop" since 2001. "Chrome in the Enterprise" is just another meme.
As soon as Microsoft will fail.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Same here for Asia (Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore).
It's supposed to be a US education market thing, but the best I can find is a market report from one company saying it has 60% of the computing devices sold in 2016.
I wish Google would just thank Sundar for his service, and hire someone who'll focus on their succesful OS.... Android, instead of repeatedly fragmenting it and while trying to wrap it in ChromeOS. Yeh we get it, Chrome OS was Sundar's baby and Android wasn't, but that's no way to run a business.
Get the business market and get the majority market share.
If you don't get the business market, then you won't get majority market share.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"Will Chromebook completely remove iPad from education?"
At work we investigated switching from corporate laptops to Chromebooks running Citrix on the theory that it would be cheaper and it would keep the data safely behind the firewalls.
At the time only one Chromebook had sufficient specs (performance, display resolution,...) and it was priced in the laptop range so we deferred. But in a couple of years Chromebooks could become good enough.
Does MS spy on you? Sure, no doubt they do to an extent. Though, when it is anything too overt, the folks here and in the media go ape shit.
You give MS money, and they give you an OS. You give Apple a dump-truck full of money and they give you a hard-ward platform which can run MacOS.
Funds paid, services rendered. Fine.
Google on the other hand gives the OS for free. They want you to use their free web-apps as well. Store your data on their free cloud drives. Maybe pay a bit to upgrade the storage.
So.. all your data is now with a company who lets you use all this stuff or free. Are they just super duper nice?
I would note that they have already clearly stated that "they" do not scan your emails, but they do let 3rd parties do so.
If you are cool with that, feel free to use their stuff and save a little money.
Of course, others already mentioned that web-apps are complete and total shit compared with dedicated programs in nearly every measurable way.
I am sure it will work great with your 5mb upload speed and 20gb data caps as well.
My company also became obsessed with web-apps even those we told our management they are shit.
4 years later, we are ditching all the web-app nonsense for real programs that all you to actually get work done in a reasonable amount of time.
Trying to herd all the productive users.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What is missing is higher education. Yes, kids use Chromebooks in school but then about half of them go into higher education where, at least in STEM at the moment, a Chromebook will not cut it. However with things like Google Colabaratory and online LaTeX sites plus the increasing power of Chromebook CPUs this could soon change.
Maybe in a decade or so a new generation will get tired of javascript black holes and unresponsive, lag ridden cloud-based "software" and actually think about going back to the idea of a PC as a fast, responsive, personal computer on which powerful software can actually be run.
Does this also imply a return to development that is specific to one desktop or mobile operating system, probably the primary operating system of the lead developer's device? Because right now, to reach all users, a developer of a native application must build, test, and distribute at least six different binary packages, one each for Windows, macOS, X11/Linux (.deb), X11/Linux (.rpm), iOS, and Android. This is true even if the application's source code uses a portability layer such that all six applications are built from the same source tree.
Thats the makeup of computers in my household.
We have 1 Windows laptop. It is used for things that only Windows can do well. Video editing, Quicken.
We have 2 chromebooks. Those are used for things that Chromebooks do really well - travel light, long battery life, and remote access. These replaced an android tablet because it wasnt enough of a computer for our remote access needs.
For most of the _work_ done in the house, we use Linux. Mostly servers but also 2 desktops. 1 of the desktops is available from anywhere in the world, so our chromebooks can access the remote desktop for a Linux desktop experience over the internet.
The right tool for the right job.
The chromebooks are the most replaceable. By 2021, Windows will be gone. Linux isnt something we can replace here. But we arent tied to a single supplier, so that isnt like being trapped by Google or MSFT or Apple. We can live with it.
Especially when they cant understand there is a difference between Operating Systems and Office suite programs.
Sure G-suite may be making inroads into the office software that office workers use day to day, but good luck trying to convince Corporations to re-tool their entire software line up to switch over to chrome books. First and foremost they will need to re-write all legacy programs, good luck with that, anyone who has worked in IT knows that struggle. Second there will need to be some sort of chrome workstation with the horsepower to handle the other assorted engineering or creative programs (data aquisition, photo and video editing, CAD/CAM). Finally, there is all of the other hardware in use that will need to be changed or modified to work with Chrome OS (medical devices, industrial machinery, CNC machines, large capital expenditures)
so please explain to me how people changing their office software is going to change their operating system?
The traditional PC will not go away for as longs as people have real work they need to do. You know, for example to create all that content that people like to consume on their latest fab device.
Not sure if it's still the case but back in the school I went to they were using iirc Ubuntu 9. It was the most boring but fascinating class I've been to, think about your grandma teaching how to use the GUI. Back then file transfers were all done with "pass the USB".
Went to college and a lot of stuff were done in web based services namely, Google. It actually is very cost effective: Free storage, free docs writer/reader, easy file sharing, high security, very good backup system, and most of all no licenses needed to pay. Of course we were still using Office 365 but they were slowly getting replaced.
Nextcloud, a free and open source alternative to Google ecosystem. It has very good apps written for Android, iOS, Windows 10, and even Windows Phone at some point. For security there are many ways to achieve it:
>Two Factor Authentication.
>Server encryption for when the concern is physical theft.
>End-to-End encryption for when a client wants privacy perhaps.
A competent Sysadmin can probably setup the whole school network without a trace of Microsoft in it.
I mean, that's sort of a silly statement against the backdrop of Windows computers as alternative. A limping one-eyed donkey crapping all over you can certainly still be a Trojan horse. At least the other Trojan horse is pretty.
We can already see services being pushed into the cloud. Even Microsoft sees this and is adapting to that. What we are not likely to repeat is a locked down platform. Even if your business is using Office365 or whatever, you'll still access other services simultaneously. Microsoft's control of the platform is slipping from their grasp. In the end we'll see a multitude of players unless someone figures out how to monopolize deploying applications.
Will the future platform be Chromebooks? I highly doubt it. With a standardized webbrowser being ubiquitous I think it is unlikely for a single platform to dominate again.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I am a consultant currently working at a large client that has completely replaced MS office with G-Suite, including GMail for email. But that is the absolute extent to which any Google "cloud" applications are used. The rest of the environment (desktop wise) is a mixture of Windows 10, Linux, and Mac, also using both Azure and AWS for development via Visual Studio, VSCode, Eclipse, I mean, whatever they want to use honestly. They also use Power BI, and a handful of other data analytics tools that I've never heard of. Anyway, I could keep going, but my point is that most companies do so much more that just cant be done on a Chromebook. It's incredibly naive, and just plain ignorant to assume that a platform serving K-12 schools is even going to come close to providing the same functionality that companies use. Hell, I rarely ever even open any office suite type applications anymore, with the exception of needing to make the occasional flow chart. Anybody that needs to do REAL work is going to need to break out of the Chromebook walled garden, and get on a real desktop OS.
I work in a school in the UK. I'm currently having arguments over exactly this subject: the powers that be want to roll out Google quickly (having already wasted *lots* of money on some iPads a few years ago, and Asus eeePCs before that). Apparently I'm the only IT guy across the multi-academy Trust who's been kicking up a stink, the rest have just rolled over and moved to Google, Chromebooks and all.
We presently have just under 1000 PCs and laptops running Windows 10 and Office 2016 / Office 365 (the latter for its easier integration with Gmail - feedback is people hate the Gmail website but get on well with Outlook). I'm doing my damndest to make sure that any new devices also run Windows and Office, so as to hook into our existing network. Pointing out that cheap laptops can do everything a Chromebook can, plus hook into our existing infrastructure has delayed the Chromebook push for now (they've already had experience with how awkward printing / file access was with the iPads). I still strongly feel that this whole one-device-per-child thing is a colosal waste of time and taxpayer money, but the sellers in education do a really good job of painting a Utopian picture of classrooms full of kids all eagerly collaborating with teacher. (What actually happens, of course, is a good chunk off them instead browse photos / websites / play games etc).
It doesn't help that there are political moves afoot to force a move to Google, such as banning removable drives (which I'm resisting, currently enforcing Bitlocker for write access). Banning removable drives would, of course, stop our SLR cameras in Photography from working, stop teachers recording the children using our video cameras on the school farm (for Animal Care), stop audio CDs being burnt for speaking and listening exams in French, stop them recording performances in Drama (again, on nice video cameras), stop potential teachers and people coming in from outside using memory sticks for their lessons / presentations and much more besides.
Google Apps isn't perfect either - as well as having less-than-great viewers for Office formats, it has no answer for Access, something which is deeply embedded in the curriculum. That means we need Office and proper PCs in our IT suites... and as such we may as well keep it elsewhere too.
I suspect, though, that eventually moves will be made to move our network storage to Google Drive, despite the lack of being able, for example, to get an Access database back from last Tuesday, as it's been overwritten by mistake. They're already planning to migrate email away from Exchange to Gmail by next summer.
Mind you, there is one thing from all this. I was brought up with Windows (2) and Office (Word 1, Excel 2) at school back in the 90s. It's quite true that if you get them at school, they'll carry it over into their adult lives...
I'd say theyre more of a threat to the macintosh than anything else.
Windows 10 is a truly terrible OS. The only improvements they seem to have made are to add advertisements, selling you stuff and spying on you.
They've either newly broken existing features or left them broken for a long time:
1) Green bar of slowness: how long does it take to fix a bug to look at the folders on the hard drive?
2) Backup and restore: I depended on this and was screwed because it doesn't back up all files, I don't know what it does but it doesn't back up files
3) Settings, in an attempt to make things more opaque they send you to the Settings instead of control panel. But the unistall in settings doesn't work right, I have to use the Control Panel for some programs. More power users I know completely avoid Settings
4) Endless slowness for no reason
5) Horrible stability, especially with hardware drivers: When it pushed Windows 10 it didn't configure my HP printer, I asked it to fix it and it complete wiped out the entire OS. It couldn't even recover. I had to reinstall the OS. And while it didn't remove my personal files it did move them to a strange location where I thought for a while I had lost the data
I'l love to chuck this miserable OS in the trash can.
Let me guess, you run... Windows?
Chromebook is really designed to take away users freedom. It really is depressing especially since Canonical botched their attempt to penetrate the consumer market and provide a PC model alternative to the Windows monopoly. What Canonical should have done is work with manufacturers to get preinstalls of Ubuntu on consumer laptops and tablets, since the logistics of doing your own mobile hardware can be too difficult to deal with. They could have also ship with an android container so native Linux and android apps can run side by side. Perhaps also a Windows 10 option (optional add-on which can be installed in an app store) in a VM preinstalled and preconfigured, preferably running Windows 10 apps rootless on the Ubuntu desktop. This would have made their device a better value for consumers. So being able to run apps from three different ecosystems would have been more appealing to consumers. Ubuntu dropped the ball by neglecting all that.
Chromebooks are not much better for user freedom than Windows, due to the focus on SAAS and the way that googles business model is based on mining customers data. Basically, all of the wins of the PC revolution would be thrown away by this throw back to the bad old days of the main frame, these chromebooks are nothing more than dumb terminals. Privacy, control, ownership are all out the window. When you store data on Googles servers, in reality, you dont really own any of that data,. google can cut off access at any time it wants or demand a fee to access your data if it thinks youve been a freeloader for too long. instead you will have to say pretty please and ask google nicely for your data and hope that it gives them to you, rather than being in possession of your own data.
All of these groupie dimwits hipsters who think we should give up PCs and store data on Googles mainframe will be quite disappointed when Google demands $100 subscriptions to get your data. Chromebooks are one of the truly the most pathetic and outrageous, anti-user thing to come along, given what Google is and what their business model is, its hard to think people are being suckered in by it
They've been saying this about Macs for 30 years.
Never worked.
These stupid things are browser-only PCs , and they won't fill their role if they don't run google "web apps", don't connect to ad and tracker servers.
Have a mobile server with battery the size of a hard drive or computer phone, which prefilters the web and offers "web apps" running locally and even regular GUI and command line apps then we can fight back against the faceless giant can't we? and it can have a hundred gigs of offline music as well. We don't need to accept bullshit.
Also, I want to see sales figures for Chromebook to see how much are in the US and how much in the rest of the world.
Nice business you have here, it would be a shame if something happened to it.
how is this different from microsoft? here in Finland kids get brainwashed with the ms office suit?
Perhaps the edu sys should concentrate on free open source stuff. But well they dont. Perhaps they are to lazy to do the legwork and set it up when it would put more work on own staff. even though it would save money in the long run.
Plus, being big in education wasn't enough to push Mac beyond windows. What makes anyone think that strategy will work now when it hasn't before?
Windows rules when you "grow up" because of its enterprise manageability and work-focused apps. Quick books for Mac is a joke, and was never on par with the Windows versions. Same thing goes for other titles like Sage MAS titles, Autocad, and so, so many others.
Chrome books won't fix it either.
Pretty much.
While itâ(TM)s a bad sign of the times when we embrace disposable electronics, itâ(TM)s still better than using 30 year old text books full of mold , bacteria, and dirt.
Apple's market strategy was largely incompatible with the start at the bottom approach. You either have a premium product where people are willing to pay for the extra polish and work, or you have a mass marketed product which is affordable at the lower and entry levels.
.NET, etc. Provide a platform that mediocre developers can push something to market fairly quickly, and you will get a stronger and more competitive market. A stronger market means one where competitors offer more kick-backs, and the prices are more affordable. This creates a popularity where new techs are more likely to gain experience with a platform, and therefore recommend that platform to businesses and organizations, as well as individuals. Thus Microsoft's platform is not one that holds strictly to a premium product, but one that scales to suit a vast spectrum.
Alphabet's Chromebook and Android platforms are geared towards this low cost entry level market, and have great potential for success.
Microsoft's dominance began because it was easy to program for. Start with QBasic, then DOS, then
Currently, Microsoft is still prevalent enough that its market dominance is not under any serious short-term threat. However, a long-term strategy of weaning the world off of Microsoft may be quite effective by starting with grade school students. Just because Apple undermined its own success, doesn't mean that the strategy itself is invalid. If children can make it to adulthood without needing any Microsoft products, then they will have no inclination to recommend Microsoft products to startups, and would be ill equipped to support Microsoft products among their peers or co-workers. This would result in a dissatisfaction in the quality of Microsoft products, and a shift in the products purchased. Furthermore, Microsoft's push around Windows 10 to a less stable platform, in the Debian definition of stable, to something that changes every six months or so, makes the many of the concerns of changing platforms largely moot. Microsoft could find itself becoming an Apple like niche premium product. If so, then one wonders what would provide Microsoft with staying power beyond Google/Alphabet? Why switch to Microsoft if a small company has survived entirely on Alphabet products? If nobody is developing software for Microsoft, then what is going to keep the costs down and the platform affordable, either programmer salary wise, or software catalog wise? What happens to the scalability and competitive market of the platform?
... which was/is a no-show in the business market.
FTFS:
If kids grow up using G Suite and Chromebooks, there's a reasonable chance they'll use them when they get older.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
As Microsoft will do anything to keep their virtual monopoly, even if it takes ( more ) illegal activity. The fines when caught are just a 'cost of doing business', and passed down to the consumer.
Google can be shady, but i dont think could ever stoop to the level needed.
Chromebooks taking over schools don't present a credible threat to Microsoft. Test by: Apple has long ruled the schools, going clear back to those weirdly shaped translucent all-in-one CRT macs in designer colors. And although one could argue that this has almost certainly increased the popularity of Apple among young adults, and made Apple extremely profitable, the most used OS on the desktop remains firmly Microsoft.
Chrome taking over in the schools doesn't change that equation. If a large footprint in schools wasn't Apple's key to taking over the desktop OS, it won't be Google's either.
What this *might* do is reduce Apple's market share among young adults by some measurable amount. But it's unreasonable to expect Chrome making inroads into Apple's market share in schools to somehow pose a treat to Microsoft. Were it that easy, Apple would already rule the desktop.
That said, as more and more casual users realize that their laptops are essentially just browser appliances, they may be attracted to the price and relative lack of bloat of chromebooks. Or tend to buy them for kids or grandparents who only need something for facebook, logging into the medical portal and maybe Amazon. The REAL threat to Microsoft is when casual users discover that they don't really need Windows for anything they do. It's been true for awhile, but Windows has a huge installed base and huge momentum. It'll take a long time to turn that around.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
We used to have portable carts of Windows laptops in every classroom. Now our school has one Windows lab remaining, two Mac labs, one Linux lab, and 550 Chromebooks. All of the servers are virtualized, and the official school policy is only to use web enabled services that run on any platform.
This is not a fad. The students and staff are very satisfied with the situation. The days of Microsoft are numbered.
Hillary Clinton did NOT earn a majority of popular votes in 2016; she earned a plurality, namely 48.2% of the vote.
Libertarian Gary Johnson earned 3.28% of the vote, and Green Jill Stein earned 1.07%, among the major third party candidates.
Math matters.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Frankly, I prefer Google Docs' feature-set-to-UI ratio. Frankly, it reminds me pleasantly of Word '97.
Maybe what I need to do is install Word '97 on a processor from 2017, and pretend I'm using an RTOS, but I suspect that will be difficult, and I'm pretty sure that nobody else will be able to open those documents any more. But you won't be able to beat that responsiveness with a stick!
I remember the same articles being written about Apple computers in schools a few decades ago. Just a few years ago, even (way too serious) analysts were projecting the demise of conventional desktop laptops in favor of mobileOS-based tablets. Bottom line: make computers useful again. CPU, storage, access to peripherals, plenty of ports, drivers for external devices, These experiments keep failing. When I can connect and use an external 4TB USB device to a Chrome computer (or Android device), I'll take then seriously. If the long-term strategy is too continue to push people to the cesspool of privacy-invading, security-lax cloud services in a closed kiosk-like device (no repairability, no ports) - Chromes (and their ilk) will stay in kiddie schools like the toy OSes they are.
Microsoft will release office apps on chrome and Linux and may entirely rewrite their desktop OS to run on top of Linux. WSL is the bridge.
Except Gsuite is so shit that it makes Office look good!
What do you mean, some day? Windows PCs gain share in K-12 in the US, but Chromebooks still dominate
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Windows rules when you "grow up" because of its enterprise manageability and work-focused apps.
A Chromebook is ideally-suited for use in educational institutions and businesses. There is a shift from applications installed and running locally to applications running on servers, locally or remotely, and end-users accessing these applications via a web browser.
Microsoft is still prevalent enough that its market dominance is not under any serious short-term threat.
You mean, after losing roughly 100% of the phone market and HPC market and major chunks of other markets? You bet Microsoft is threatened, there is a reason they are hiring Linux devs and shifting major parts of their business to Linux.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Yeah, the kids all have chromebooks, at my school. And they all hate them. They're slow, and they're useless without an internet connection. Not to mention that a lot of my students are becoming more security conscious .
If a school is deploying ChromeBooks, there is likely always available Wi-Fi at school. Everywhere students hangout these days has free WiFi; use a VPN web browser plug-in for security. Thinking back to my high school years nothing we did could not have been completed on a ChromeBook. Heck we used manual typewriters for our essays and papers so ChromeBooks and Google Apps would have been a huge step up.
I use it daily. Yes, I've tried gimp and others, but they don't work for me, as well as photoshop.
For me Windows is a crippleware, toy OS that isn't very capable. The only thing I use it for is games and entertainment. All of the work gets done on Red Hat and OpenBSD.
Eventually.
'The cloud' which many of us don't like here, is /generally/ proving to be good enough for base users. While you and I might bemoan the performance of Google Sheets vs Excel (or alt) when doing a heap of work on a massive spreadsheet. Most 'normies' are finding it good enough.
Same goes for web browsing, document writing and what have you. Especially as you go up the chain to middle and upper management where 2/3 of the job is emails, graphs, documents.
Then there's web based tools to do the work, my last place wen't for a web based call logging option, over the local client. If you used it day in day out? Tough luck, the managers liked not having a local install so they could occassionally look at the web version. Not good for those of us using hotkeys.
End of the day, Windows days really do appear numbered. People have said it for years but it seems to really be taking place. Since all the Windows apps are now either on the web, or cross platform. Heck they might even be on ipad / phone.
I for one, do enough stuff, even just 'regular stuff' but in such amounts, I need a local beefy PC. However that's becoming a rare thing again, so we're going to (and already are!) starting to pay more for our hardware, as the 'normies' are no longer subsidising our purchases.
It's a bad time to be a real hardcore PC enthusiast. Between inflation / monetary policy of the last decade, the slowdown in the shrinking of transistors, the movement to handheld / online stuff, a top of the line PC is quite expensive again.
Microsoft is the greatest enemy of Windows.
Obviously schools are critical, look how Apple dominates desktop computing with its decades of school dominance!
sarcasm aside I think schools are highly overrated for their influence here, especially nowadays when the difference between a windows and chromebook user from a school perspectivie is basically ZERO, both of them you open a browser for the majority of your work, the rest is all down to individual apps/
does it matter?
... is zero-fuss rollout in a large organisation. That's what webapps are really good for. If you can build it as a webapp without compromising performance and responsiveness and you expect pushback from internal IT, web is the way to go.
Other than that, custom rich clients are always the better solution. As a professional web application developer I totally agree on that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Will Chromebooks challenge MS Windows?
"They've unseated the Mac in schools. ... Chromebooks are also Trojan horses. Children and teens use them for schoolwork and more. ... If kids grow up using G Suite and Chromebooks, there's a reasonable chance they'll use them when they get older."
you mean, like those Mac's they have replaced? those were never a challenge to MS Windows either.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The days of which OS uou use being important are almost gone. It's all about computers being thin clients these days. Microsoft are more concerned about selling their cloud services. That's where the money is. The "pay as you use" model is much more lucrative than the "buy and use forever" model.
In the Apple ][ days, Apple gave schools significant discounts to get their products in. Macs were significantly discounted when they came out.
Now, there are no real discounts that make it a significant advantage with the razor thin budgets that schools have. If Apple does make a model of Mac like the eMac, something to distribute to schools, coupled with a decent MDM system, Apple could retake K-12 and buy back their mindshare.
One issue about using a non-MS operating system in K-12: It means that the high school grads have fewer marketable skills and useful experience in the real world. There is an expression, "You will be running Windows at your job, or you don't have a job." Outside of the educational system, the world runs on Microsoft, and eventually will move to Azure as MS moves core features away from the server OS.
I'm not a fan of how MS is so gung-ho with telemetry data, and where privacy is an afterthought. I keep a PC around for games, but my serious work gets done on a Mac, where Apple at least keeps the trespass and theft of data to hand to advertisers to a minimum.
By âoereal worldâ youâ(TM)re obviously not talking about most software development industries, because every company/team Iâ(TM)ve been a part of for the past 10+ years has handed out nothing but Mac laptops, while running production services on EC2. No Microsoft involved. Maybe Outlook / 365, but most run GSuite.
Math does matter. Is 48.2% > 46.1% > 3.28% > 1.07% ? Is it? It fucking is. SHE WON THE MAJORITY OF POPULAR VOTES. The majority = the most. Did she get the most? Yes, yes she fucking did.
You can't actually be serious. Mac market share rose slightly when the iPhone was introduced. Then it dropped a bit again, and is still hovering somewhere between 9 and 10% of the market. By any standard, Mac on the desktop is mostly irrelevant. It'll get less relevant over time. Particularly these days when a dev shop don't need a Mac to write and debug software for iOS.
They never had the phone or HPC markets to begin with, at least not in any significant way. They still dominate desktops and enterprise with marketshares that have barely budged in decades and still dominate office suites and their cloud offerings are the fastest growing market (that is the area they hire Linux devs for).