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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.
Macs were not successful primarily because of the cost, Apple do not make cheap lowend desktops to compete with the machines that the average corporation buys thousands of to throw on everyone's desks.
ChromeOS devices on the other hand are available cheaply and from several suppliers.
Chrome lacks the biggest disadvantage of apple (price), while offering many significant advantages over windows for a corporate environment.
When it comes to custom applications, especially in-house ones, many of these are now web based and the market is heading that way. The client does not matter when the custom apps are web based. Those few remaining (and declining numbers) apps which are not web based can usually be handled via rdp or telnet/ssh clients with the apps running on a remote host.
In most of the offices i see, what the majority of users are doing could easily be performed on a chromebook, and switching to chromebooks would result in significant cost savings and security benefits.
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If enough people -- especially in management -- use chromebooks -- corporate IT will eventually find a way to wedge them into their network. Easier to adapt than to try to deal with a constant deluge of questions about why what works at home or in school doesn't work at work. Training people is harder than training chihuahuas. (Our chihuahua flunked puppy school ... twice).
And if chromebook based IT eventually turns out to be say $25 per seat cheaper than MS based IT, you can bet management will want to switch.
As far as individual users are concerned, I'm not a big Google fan and I dislike both Chrome and most Google stuff other than the excellent search engine, but I can't see that it makes a lot of difference whether one is being spied on by Google or Microsoft. Assuming roughly equal capability, I'd go with whichever is cheaper.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Collaborative editing has its uses but I wouldn't call that a killer feature. Which is probably why non cloudy variants haven't taken off yet, because it's not the architecture that is stopping it.
Collaborative editing is the killer feature, especially in the workplace. Actually, perhaps that's the second killer feature, right behind the ability to have a single copy of a doc that is accessible from all devices, by all interested people.
I was converted years ago (shortly after joining Google, actually, though the same events could have happened anywhere) during a design review meeting. I presented my design for the implementation of a new software feature to a group of other engineers. They shredded it, in a good way, providing many significant improvements and simplifications. Normally, this would have meant that I'd have left the room with a lot of work I needed to do, to document all of the changes. But during the meeting, eight people were simultaneously editing my design doc so by the time I left the only thing I had to do was to clean up some inconsistencies and polish the language a bit. What would have taken hours took less than 10 minutes.
In the years since, I've come to rely so heavily on collaborative editing that I cannot imagine going back. Even though the "collaborative" part is often sequential, having a single shared, cloud-based copy of the doc to pass around between people is fantastically better than emailing copies, tracking the most recent version and perhaps integrating changes from multiple copies. And not just at work, but at home as well. Whether it's kids wanting my thoughts on their school papers (I never edit directly, only add comments), my wife wanting me to edit the annual Christmas letter, a shared spreadsheet I built to track the distribution of my father in law's estate (my wife was the executor)... it's unbelievably better to have a shared document in the cloud. In every case. I can't think of a single time in my personal or professional life that I'd have preferred to keep separate versions.
I said I can't imagine what it's like to go back, but that isn't actually true. I don't have to imagine it. I recently joined a couple of international standards committees that still exchange documents the old way. Even with a shared document repository (iso.org web portal) it is still so painful to handle document sharing and versioning. We end up with dozens -- and I'm sure eventually hundreds -- of separate files that represent stages in the draft standard, not to mention an order of magnitude more documents containing comments and suggested changes from all of the participants. Also, because documents are too non-interactive for discussion, there are volumes of separate email threads about all of the above documents. It would be dramatically more efficient to have a single shared doc that allowed collaborative editing and in-doc comment and discussion threads. Google docs retains full version history so important "checkpoint" versions can be labeled for posterity, and of course all of the discussion on comments is retained.
Even for documents that I create on my own with no collaboration of any sort (though that's actually really rare) I prefer cloud-based docs, because then they're always available on all of my devices, or any other device I might use. I enable offline editing on all of my devices as well, so that's not a problem either -- though I'm really not often offline. Overseas flights and camping in the mountains are about the only times I don't have a network connection.
Yeah, there are a few features that office software packages have that their cloud-based versions lack, but none of them are remotely worth giving up having a single copy accessible on all devices and by all relevant people.
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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?