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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.
...Windows will be about as popular as Hillary.
So it'll still be the choice of the majority? SAD.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The last comments here tend to suggest you still see Chromebooks as "A OS running a web browser", but that hasn't been the case for a while.
While Chromebooks have always had a native API, very few applications have been written for it so it kinda got ignored by most people and there was always an assumption that Chromebooks can't run local apps; but in the last two years most Chromebooks now have the capability to run Android apps.
OK, but what about LaTeK, to name something you specifically identify above?
Well, that bit is being rolled out. It's still effectively a beta but Crostini, a way to run arbitrary GNU/Linux apps in a sandbox, is being rolled out right now. Within the next couple of years, it'll be a standard part of ChromeOS, and the current quirks (it doesn't support hardware accelerated graphics and a few other features it needs) will be resolved.
The only issue Chromebooks have ever had with local apps is the lack of developer interest, but Google is addressing that.
I use one. I don't use Crostini because it's not stable and not in any way finished, but it's clearly coming along nicely and people are using it to run IDEs and other tools. The Android feature makes it a "better Android tablet than an Android tablet" oddly enough, and it's kinda funny running Outlook and various video conferencing systems on it that happen to run better on ChromeOS than they do on Windows. Once Crostini is stable, and I can run Atom on this thing, I can see it becoming my main work machine.
As for universities, it's way more complex than "Students need a way to run X". Most courses aren't going to require anything other than a web browser, perhaps with a subscription to Office 365. For them, a Chromebook will do right now. For others it's not, and never will be, going to be that simple.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Most people only use 3 applications: web browser, word processor and email. For a lot, they don't create anything so a word processor is not needed and they also use some sort of web-mail - so the only application that they use is a web browser.
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/
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.