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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
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.
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.
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."
Manufacturers have been trying this for years. The ASUS PadFone is probably the craziest combination... a phone that docks to a tablet which can then slot into a keyboard docking station. I'm sure Acer's been trying something as well, although they might not be crazy enough to actually market it.
They... don't seem to outsell anything.
I'm inclined to think that the root of the problem is that nobody has quite nailed down the secret sauce to make a mobile phone operating system work well enough in laptop form factor to get people to spend the extra money on a proprietary dock.
Log in or piss off.
You should be preparing students by showing them a range of different technologies, showing them how to get their work done using whatever tools are available and how to pick the best tool for a given task for a range of options.
Getting tied to a particular technology is a bad idea, because by the time these kids enter the workforce whatever they learned in school will be obsolete and have been replaced with something else. Teach them how to adapt, embrace change and get things done regardless of what tools are given to them.
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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. [...] How do we best prepare our students in general?
At least for me personally, I think the best thing that can be done is to try and teach conceptual computing by abstracting the principles from the products. Skilled, educated students should be able to be able to compose a document with basic formatting in pretty much anything from Word to Docs to WordPerfect to Writer to AbiWord. It stopped shocking me that people don't understand how files and folders work; many think files are "in Word" because the only way they know to access their documents is using the File->Open command...and don't get me started with the wizardry that they ascribe to knowing Ctrl+O, Ctrl+S, and Ctrl+X/C/V.
Essentially, I think you're asking the wrong question, because you're debating which product to teach. Don't teach Docs or Word, teach word processing. Don't teach Sheets or Excel, teach spreadsheets. Don't teach Windows or Linux, teach file management. Don't teach Chrome or Firefox, teach web browsers. Part of the 'higher' part of 'higher education' is being exposed to lots of different things, and learning to problem solve. Most of the students who are entering the freshman year are simply not taught these skills.
Part of the problem is that tech in K-12 is a train wreck. Boards and superintendents implement products based on shiny pamphlets and demo sessions, and computer teachers who are skilled at both computers and teaching are rare (so students are either taught correct information poorly or taught well but incorrect or limited information).
By the time information gets to kids, they're generally better off with Youtube tutorials or self-motivated exploration of Sourceforge...except they can't do those things at school since computers can't run applications IT doesn't approve, and at home, the aging desktop is probably either a magnet for "don't touch that" or a malware-ridden train wreck of uselessness.
In conclusion, obviously a rando Slashdot commenter is not going to be a reason for the powers that be to turn around their feelings on the matter...but for whatever it's worth, teaching 'computing' rather than 'G-Suite' or 'MS Office' is what I really feel will benefit the kids the most.
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.