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.

Comments

Missing something here

[redback]

As if kids fresh out of school have any power to challenge the status quo of corporate IT

Re:Missing something here

[cascadingstylesheet]

As if kids fresh out of school have any power to challenge the status quo of corporate IT

They do, over time.

Their ideas have certainly taken over HR fast enough.

Re:Missing something here

[CastrTroy]

The fact that the iPhones and Android phones took over the corporate market from BlackBerry in a very short period of time shows that employees can force change on their employers.

Re:Missing something here

[vtcodger]

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.

Re:Missing something here

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely correct. In the 3D media creation content world, Maya by Autodesk is still number one, despite the fact it gets pitiful support money, is buggy as hell and desperately needs a rewrite from the inside out. There are apps that compete with it that are stunningly better, but if they haven't been gobbled up by the autodesk monster and haphazardly duct taped to Maya, they struggle to get a foothold simply because Autodesk is all over the schools. Don't belittle the kids, they're junior, annoying and aren't all geniuses, but you seed the world eventually the old guard dies off.

I've bought a pixelbook, it's not perfect, but nothing is. I use it every day, super happy with it, I don't think Windows should shut the corner store just yet, but it's a considerable opponent. MS has been polishing the windows turd for many years now, time to wake up.

Re: Missing something here

[Alain Williams]

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.

Re:Missing something here

[Tough Love]

In the 3D media creation content world, Maya by Autodesk is still number one

And incidentally, runs on Linux because Hollywood requires it to.

Re:Missing something here

[gravewax]

I think you are giving far to much credit to Apple and Google. Blackberry was a complete nightmare on the admin and management side, it server was a buggy pile of poo and app deployment was an exercise in self evisceration. Enterprises were all screaming to replace Blackberry.

Re: Missing something here

[jbengt]

The reason Windows is dominant even today is because when PCs first came out IBM dominated the business market. So when IBM came out with their PC, business buyers saw the other brands as toys and decided to buy the IBM version. Since IBM bundled MS-DOS, and especially when IBM clones started shipping with MS-DOS, Microsoft became the defacto standard for application writers. There are many reasons MS held on to their lead, a lot of which was business familiarity, and a lot of which was dirty dealing with their monopoly on the PC.

Re:Missing something here

[Tough Love]

Random troll on the internet can't google? Here is one of many

No

[peppepz]

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.

Re:No

[Zontar The Mindless]

...Windows will be about as popular as Hillary.

So it'll still be the choice of the majority? SAD.

Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly was wrong with a fast, fully featured, files on your drive executable I will never understand.

Exactly one thing: They can't charge you rent if you own the software. (Yes, I know, you don't really own the software. It's licensed....blah, blah, blah. Tell that to my 90's copy of Paint Shop Pro that still does most of what I need in graphic editing. Even at Adobe's rock-bottom sale price, renting Photoshop would have cost me about $2,400 by now. New features are important, you say? Not nearly as much as marketers would have you believe.)

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

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.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

Isn't version control a solved problem?

Not in Microsoft Office. Or any of its competitors.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[Beeftopia]

Google Docs are in fact, fantastic for editing documents. Sending a link to a doc in email, and telling people "click on this link to edit the document for the meeting Tuesday" works very well. As opposed to trading it via email. Or even putting it on a shared drive, because that requires non-computer types to navigate to that directory, as opposed to just clicking on a link.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

Not to mention that everyone can edit (if allowed), perhaps simultaneously, with all changes tracked, including who made them. And that it works on all major operating systems and device types.

Re:Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[Beeftopia]

The problem with a rich client is that it increases the attack surface. If the web browser were essentially like the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or Windows Common Language Runtime (CLR), on which remote sites could run arbitrary code, it would be instant pwnage for everyone connected to the Internet. Yes, we could get Microsoft Office levels of usability and functionality, but at quite a cost.

Right now, Google Apps run within the browser, which is deeply embedded in the local PC, but it also designed to protect from malicious actors.

Resolving the security needs of connecting to the wild and malicious Web (which the browser does) versus functionality and usability enabled by a local language interpreter (like the JVM or CLR) is a tricky problem.

Re:Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[angryargus]

I often tell people that Google Docs is the feature set of 1990s MSFT Office at 1980s speed (eg Microsoft Multiplan on a TI-99/4A). I suppose Google is trying to mask how horrible their stuff is by raising a generation of people who’ve never used anything else and don’t know how much better things can be (ie, ignorance is bliss).

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[Monster_user]

OneNote 2016 has wonderful version tracking. Given its tight integrations with other Office products I've privately nick-named it "Office 2016".

When a OneNote document does not exceed the single digit GBs, it is an excellent collaboration tool. Unfortunately, syncing larger notebooks reveals where OneNote comes up short. Triple digit GB OneNote notebooks are largely unusable, despite the highly dynamic UI being very popular.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[Aviation Pete]

As much as I agree with your opinion on shared documents - they are a complement to the tools available on rich clients, not a replacement for them.

I am currently editing a grant proposal and will load the final version into OO in order to polish it. Google Docs is not able to even do proper hyphenation - this and much more will be left to OO. There is no online replacement wich can compete on features, let alone response speed.

And don't get me started on the qualities of Office 365. In my installation, Outlook cannot even load a PDF of more than a few 100 KB, or loading takes forever. This is barely more than a sick joke.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

As much as I agree with your opinion on shared documents - they are a complement to the tools available on rich clients, not a replacement for them.

For me they're a replacement. I am happy to do without a few obscure features in order to have the benefits I described.

I am currently editing a grant proposal and will load the final version into OO in order to polish it. Google Docs is not able to even do proper hyphenation - this and much more will be left to OO.

OO doesn't do proper hyphenation either, though I'll grant it's a little better than Google Docs. If you really need polished output there's basically no alternative to LaTeX.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

Yeah sort of like Office 365 except without all the usefulness of Office.

If Office 365 provides the cloud repository and collaborative editing features of Google Docs plus the richness and power of Office, it is indeed the best possible solution. I've never used Office 365 so I can't comment on whether it does.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

Yeah sort of like Office 365 except without all the usefulness of Office.

If Office 365 provides the cloud repository and collaborative editing features of Google Docs plus the richness and power of Office, it is indeed the best possible solution. I've never used Office 365 so I can't comment on whether it does.

Oh, one caveat: To be the "best possible solution", you also need solid cross-platform support, including on mobile devices. Not sure what Office 365 provides there.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[ksw_92]

You really should spend a little coin and try O365. A 5-user family plan is cheap and will allow you to go pretty far down the rabbit hole. With native apps on all major platforms (now that Chromebooks can run normal Play Store-sourced apps) I think Google has some catching up to do. My organization has both GApps and O365 available to its 14k+ users and a O365 has about a 7:1 use ratio over Google. Admittedly, there is a bias toward Microsoft because of the long institutional use of Office products.

We see that the new generation joining the workforce are more likely to start with GApps. They switch over to O365 after some time because working offline with full-fat applications is something they find they need.

Interestingly, my kids' school district used GApps for students, at least in grades 9-12. As my kids moved on to college (Cal State system schools for all of them) they were given O365 accounts by their schools. I expect that a lot of kids are learning both platforms and that's a net benefit to them.

I think GApps is going to start getting into a bind as people focus more on how their personal data and online activity is being used.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

Cool. Competition is good!

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

If itâ(TM)s not made by google it must suck amirite

Not at all. Competition is good.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

Heh. I decided to create a OneDrive account (I have an Office license for the ISO committee work I'm doing) and give it a try. First doc I uploaded and tried to view/edit in a browser, I get an error "Sorry, this document can't be opened for editing." The view mode looks fine, though it took a long time to load. I suppose browser-based editing is probably a second-class citizen given that most people use a desktop Office install, so maybe that's understandable. Not a good first look, though. If it worked well, I'd like to delete the Office installation on my laptop and just use the browser-based view. That would let me use Office docs on my Linux desktop as well as on my MacBook... and on a Chromebook as well, without need for the Android app.

However, since the view mode works, this does add immediate value for me: I can link ISO working group documents from my GSuite design docs without having to first generate PDFs. I'll also experiment with collaborative editing with other WG members. That could be a big time-saver if I can evangelize its use within the WG.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

none of them are remotely worth giving up having a single copy accessible on all devices and by all relevant people.

single copy editing is lame. If you work as a software developer at Google how can you not know about version control systems? They are far more powerful than simple collaborative editing of shared files. This has been a solved problem in software development for decades now. If collaborative editing was all you needed then nobody would be using version control systems like Perforce or Git.

Obviously I use VCSs all the time for software development, and I have been experimenting with an approach for using a DVCS for management of legal codes (legislative bills are just patches, and a branch-and-pull approach would provide a nice origin and edit history) and similar. However, typical document editing has a different sort of workflow, less formal, with different needs. The editing process needs to be lightweight and synchronization automatic; I think DVCS is an anti-pattern for this. I have used git for collaborative editing of LaTeX documents, and it's really not as smooth or nice as something like Google Docs.

Actually, DVCS-based management does sound ideal for ISO WG documents, though. Better than Google Docs / Office 365. Single copy editing might be good for rapid collaboration, but formal updates to the official working draft should ideally be commits.

Re:Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[yes-but-no]

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.

1) Your files and data reside in cloud; so They can snoop on you and also hold you hostage as you won't easily leave their service (downloading multi GB of your data is not fun; so you end up paying the yearly subscription fee).
2) software upgrade; service can be changed instantly on the server side(say they want to introduce a new spyware feature; asking you to upgrade the app is not easy as you will ignore the 'helpful suggestion')
3) Since you have already submitted to their service and have data in their servers, they can do pricing changes at will
4) May be tie-ups with access providers like mobile broadband ISPs since you will consume more bandwidth; also since you need a network connection they may push new ads which may not possible on a offline PC with their software.
5) They get access to big data to mine and do things like ML/AI
Bottom line, cloud /SaaS makes more financial sense than doing stand-alone offline PC based.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[jbengt]

Happened to a colleague of mine about 4 years ago. He was working on a long spreadsheet that was tracking design review comments and responses for a construction project, and someone accidentally deleted it, so he had to reproduce all his work.

It would be a Pyrrhic victory

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Yeah, sure chromebook might become the personal device of choice for many outselling windows by numbers.

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.

Re:It would be a Pyrrhic victory

[c]

A docking station clamshell [*] might outsell both.

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.

Re:It would be a Pyrrhic victory

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Switching from a totally swipe based screen interface on phone to track pad on the keyboard is the major stumbling block It think.

The docking clamshell should let the phone be docked where the trackpad is and allow it to be used as a touch interface.

Re:It would be a Pyrrhic victory

[Chrontius]

I'm aghast that Google wasted the opportunity to turn the Motorola Atrix into the next Nexus phone, which ran Android on the handheld and ChromeOS on the laptop.

It could have been the exact thing you're talking about, as well as bringing your phone's fat data plan to your laptop without carrier support for tethering, or ugly hacks.

Re:It would be a Pyrrhic victory

[Areyoukiddingme]

Switching from a totally swipe based screen interface on phone to track pad on the keyboard is the major stumbling block It think.

Pretty sure you're right, especially since Microsoft is experiencing exactly that problem from the opposite end.

By the same logic, Macs should now be big

[Kjella]

Sorry, but what graphics software your kid makes doodles in isn't going to replace Photoshop.

Re:By the same logic, Macs should now be big

[johnsie]

Photoshop will be cloud based in under 5 years. It's better for them to maintain one version than versions for all different operating systems.

Are students being prepared?

[Monoman]

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.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Stormwatch]

we were discussing G vs MS the other day.

Why either of those? How about: regular laptops with Linux. This way you get a full-featured (not cloud-centric) desktop OS that is not subject to either megacorporation's whims and has a ton of available software.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Monoman]

Because as I previously stated, we are currently a MS shop seeing most of our students coming in from K-12 which is a G suite environment. This is a public 2 yr college. We don't provide students with devices to take home and we weren't discussion specific programs that may have specific needs. We are trying to prepare the average student for their next school or job.

The discussion had nothing to do with our own personal viewpoints on choosing an OS or computing "ecosystem".

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Bert64]

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.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[tepples]

I work in higher ed (community/state college with only a few 4yr programs) and we were discussing G vs MS the other day.

How about: regular laptops with Linux.

Taxpayers might call buying laptops designed to run GNU/Linux a waste of money if the Linux driver NDA exception tax exceeds the Windows tax, as Shikaku mentioned.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Zontar The Mindless]

That's specific to one vendor and the choices it's made. There are plenty of ubiquitous and cheaper hardware options that will work with any of several Linux distros that are available gratis.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Voyager529]

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.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Monoman]

Although I may personally agree with most, if not all, of what you are saying I am not a teacher so I have no impact on curriculum officially.

IT staff discusses and proposes ideas conversationally to the academics. On the staff side of things we have some influence.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Monoman]

I think teaching people to learn is huge. I also see the longer impact of teaching versus training.

Although I may personally agree with most, if not all, of what you are saying I am not a teacher so I have no impact on curriculum officially.

IT staff discusses and proposes ideas conversationally to the academics. On the staff side of things we have some influence.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[swillden]

My local university went full-on GSuite a few years ago. Maybe a little because that's what students are used to, but mostly because it's more productive for staff and easier for the university to manage. Oh, and I'm told it's much, much cheaper, too.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[tepples]

Which other "ubiquitous and cheaper hardware options" for fully GNU/Linux-compatible laptops are any good, so that a city school system or a community college can compare their prices? Buying a Windows laptop just to wipe it and install GNU/Linux still involves paying the Windows tax. Nor does the maker of a Windows laptop offer guarantee that accelerated graphics, audio, WLAN, Bluetooth, backlight brightness, and suspend will work under GNU/Linux. See, for example, everything that's broken or missing on ASUS Transformer Book T100TA.

Re: Are students being prepared?

[spongman]

Yeah, and they should teach them Klingon in their international business studies course.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Tough Love]

...if the Linux driver NDA exception tax exceeds the Windows tax, as Shikaku mentioned.

Your friend Shikaku likes to post utter bullshit. Whether its Intel or AMD, Linux just works on modern laptops, including wifi, chipset power management, sound, GPU, nearly every USB device you can think of and even custom keyboard buttons for most popular laptops. Not drivers to install, it all just comes bundled as loadable modules. Unlike Windows driver madness, where you are sure to be orphaned sooner or later when the vendor doesn't provide a driver for Microsoft's latest incompatible spyware.

If you doubt me, then just stick in one of these bootable sticks on a random Windows laptop and see what happens. Usually, it just pops up with everything working, put in your wifi password and you're on the net. Without touching the hard disk, unless you tell it to.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Tough Love]

I agree, schools should buy Chromebooks, for standardization if for no other reasons. That's why schools are buying Chromebooks.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Drethon]

This is my approach to programming. Often the class is to teach Java/C#/etc but I try to teach first thinking critically about how you want the program to work, then how to write it in the current language. Doesn't work with everyone.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Hognoxious]

We're talking about a community college here. The students don't want to know about concepts; they want to know how to put a word in comic sans because when they go for a job interview they aren't going to be asked about concepts. They're going to be asked if they know how to put a word in comic sans.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

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

I think this is the right approach. Younger people are more adaptable, and should be able to apply the fundamentals to a different product. Plus there's no guarantee it will be the same products in 10-20 years time anyways. I did elementary school with Apple II / DOS computers, middle school and high school with Macs, university with Windows PCs. Switching platforms didn't harm me.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Drethon]

We're talking about a community college here. The students don't want to know about concepts; they want to know how to put a word in comic sans because when they go for a job interview they aren't going to be asked about concepts. They're going to be asked if they know how to put a word in comic sans.

Doesn't matter what they want to learn, if they can't adapt over time to new skills necessary to the job they wont have a career that lasts more than a few years.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Hognoxious]

Wild guess: you're a CS student/grad.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Drethon]

Wild guess: you're a CS student/grad.

Computer/Electrical Engineering

Re:Are students being prepared?

[tepples]

Linux just works on modern laptops, including wifi, chipset power management, sound, GPU

With some big exceptions. See experiences installing Debian on an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA. Power management, suspend, hibernate, screen brightness, Bluetooth, and camera are all broken, and WLAN and sound are broken in Debian main because they require nonfree firmware distributed separately. Good luck downloading a WLAN driver with broken WLAN; you'll need to instead buy a supported USB Ethernet adapter.

Caught between a stone and a hard place

[Teun]

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.

Re: Caught between a stone and a hard place

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you can avoid systemd with both a chrome book or windows

There's more to life than Office

[DalM]

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.

Re: There's more to life than Office

[chill]

The difference today is that more and more of those non office applications are web-based or have a web interface. Fewer and fewer require applications to run on specific computer platform. Combine that with vdi and you have a Chrome solution.

Re:There's more to life than Office

[Bert64]

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.

Re:There's more to life than Office

[tepples]

Most of the custom applications used where I work are web applications. But a Chromebook would still not work so well because everyone seems to have one exception. One is Excel, as one of our suppliers encourages us to use the macro-driven Excel workbook that it supplies to pre-validate product feeds before we upload them. Another is Photoshop, used to touch up product images before uploading them. I doubt that Wine in Crostini is the answer.

Re:There's more to life than Office

[Mr D from 63]

Also, Apple really focused on the I-Pad for schools. They were popular because "I-Pad" was equated with 'latest tech'. But tablets aren't good for schools, the notebook form factor is much more practical.

And then the cost factors became reality, making Chromebooks an easy choice for most schools.

Re: There's more to life than Office

[DalM]

iPads aren't good for anything except going kids to shut up and watch Netflix.

Re: There's more to life than Office

[Tough Love]

it's I-Pad. Because you are so bothered by it.

I like that. Adopted :)

Re: There's more to life than Office

[Tough Love]

I-Pads make decent paperweights, then you put your coffee cup on top.

Re:There's more to life than Office

[Tough Love]

one of our suppliers encourages us to use the macro-driven Excel workbook that it supplies to pre-validate product feeds before we upload them

Wow, must suck to work where you work. Just find a company capable of using Web technologies, it's more likely to survive.

Re:There's more to life than Office

[tepples]

As long as Amazon isn't fully "capable of using Web technologies", any company that sells on Amazon isn't either.

Re: There's more to life than Office

[DalM]

Don't put your coffee cup on it. You might crack the screen and ruin the resale value to flip to some other sucker with kids they need to shut up.

You don't see Chrome Workstations

[xack]

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.

Re:You don't see Chrome Workstations

[Bert64]

High end is a niche... Although what you really mean are "high end desktops", since the ultimate high end (supercomputers) are actually dominated by linux already.

Most corporate desktops are lowend machines doing mundane tasks, chromeos can perform the vast majority of these mundane tasks with less cost, less maintenance overhead and less security risks than windows.

Re:You don't see Chrome Workstations

[Pinky's Brain]

Most employees don't need workstations, they just need a desktop to get a better monitor and keyboard. An USB-C dock suffices for that.

Re: You don't see Chrome Workstations

[KixWooder]

They arenâ(TM)t HIPAA approved. Ive only worked in healthcare. No cloud suite is HiIPAA approved yet, as far as I know.

Re: You don't see Chrome Workstations

[Chrontius]

https://cloud.google.com/secur...

Actually, Google's cloud products seem to support HIPAA compliance now, so long as the customer holds up their end of the bargain.

Sure it will!

[aglider]

As soon as Microsoft will fail.

Business market is the key

[Karmashock]

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.

iPad

[Cmdln Daco]

"Will Chromebook completely remove iPad from education?"

Its not just schools

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

When it's free, you're the product

[pablo_max]

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.
 

Two ad brands

[AHuxley]

Trying to herd all the productive users.

Higher Education is what is Missing

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Higher Education is what is Missing

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:Higher Education is what is Missing

[Immerman]

It's also worth noting that STEM has traditionally been a stronghold of UNIX and Linux - most important stuff, both legacy and cutting-edge, considers 'NIX to the primary target platform, with Windows usually having a ported version. If Chromebooks embrace their Linux inheritance, they will get native compatibility with that ecosystem and its vast practical software library. Coupled with being able to run the vast Android app ecosystem for popular "light" software? That might actually be a potent combination.

Re: Higher Education is what is Missing

[Immerman]

Perhaps not biology so much, but chemistry, engineering, physics - any field that does a lot of simulation or other computational work will probably be using 'NIX in the back rooms. Perhaps not on their desktops, but Windows starts showing its weaknesses (and getting expensive) when you're running it on hundreds or thousands of compute nodes.

Re:Higher Education is what is Missing

[Roger W Moore]

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.

That was specifically why I mentioned the increasing CPU. However, for the moment that is not really the case. My daughter just started first year university physics with a Chromebook from school and we have already had to replace it with a real laptop. The Chromebook could not run the applications she needed for first year labs.

Rich clients are OS-specific

[tepples]

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.

Re:Rich clients are OS-specific

[vtcodger]

As opposed to the "Code Once, Screw Up Everywhere" philosophy of the cloud? You'll have to excuse me. I've just wasted a number of hours determining that my simple Javascript that almost worked is never going work right because the API I'm invoking appears to be broken. I'll now revert to the local workaround that I should have used in the first place. And the last three web sites I've tried to use to do different simple stuff are all broken in multiple browsers.

I'm not in an especially good mood.

Re:Rich clients are OS-specific

[tepples]

That's still four, which is greater than one and requires a lot of recurring purchases, particularly for the macOS and iOS side.

Someone has to create

[CptLoRes]

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.

Indirectly, yes

[OrangeTide]

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.

Riiiight...

[ZenDragon]

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.

Quite possibly...

[Retron]

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...

Chromebooks= no freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Chromebooks= no freedom

[Pinky's Brain]

It's not the lack of freedom which is the problem, it's the lack of privacy. Most people don't want freedom, they want security, including against user error. They don't want the freedom to be able to shoot themselves in the foot in a million ways. They'll even sacrifice privacy for that kind of security.

The development and user model of chromebooks is the shining example of the only way Linux can be successful for computing for the general population. A very limited core set of software AND hardware configurations with high QA coverage, with the core software centrally administered with no way for the user to screw things up. Non core apps should all be containerized. Also add client side encrypted cloud backup of all their data so they can just switch to a new computer at will.

Ubuntu could give customers the best of both worlds, a centrally administered walled garden where they can't hurt themselves much, with the option to also run a self administered generic Ubuntu, with non containerized applications, at their own risk. Without datamining them like Google does.

Sure they are

[nospam007]

Nice business you have here, it would be a shame if something happened to it.

Re: ewaste of the future

[saloomy]

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.

Re: ewaste of the future

[Monster_user]

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.

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 .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.

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?

Didn't work for Apple ...

[CaptainDork]

... 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.

Re:Feels highly unlikely.

[Scarletdown]

Could it be that stronger privacy laws in the EU are why you never see Chrome Books there? Remember, these are devices from a company that thrives on selling out its users to any advertiser who will pay them enough.

Maybe, but not for that reason

[roc97007]

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.

False: Hillary did not earn a majority

[Nova Express]

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.

Simplified UI über alles.

[Chrontius]

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!

Re:Simplified UI über alles.

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Other people will be able to open your Word '97 .doc files no problem. However you won't be able to open their .docx, and .odt files. Microsoft's compatibility addon for .docx wasn't released for versions older than 2000.

I've read this before and before...

[found404]

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.

No and hereâ(TM)s why.

[Bruha]

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.

What do you mean, some day?

[Tough Love]

What do you mean, some day? Windows PCs gain share in K-12 in the US, but Chromebooks still dominate

Re: ewaste of the future

[Tough Love]

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.

Not if it won't run photoshop

[p51d007]

I use it daily. Yes, I've tried gimp and others, but they don't work for me, as well as photoshop.

Re:Not if it won't run photoshop

[johnsie]

photoshop will move to cloud eventually.

Without question, yes

[AbRASiON]

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.

greatest thread

[slashfrog.leg]

Microsoft is the greatest enemy of Windows.

yeah right!

[gravewax]

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/

The prime selling point of webapps ...

[Qbertino]

... 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.

answer is in the intro

[sad_]

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.

Operating system is not as important now

[johnsie]

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.

Re:One Windows Lab

[peppepz]

Setting aside the matter of productivity, this means that every activity of your students can be spied by multinationals for profit and by politicians for identity cultivation. Very disturbing. In my opinion the students should be protesting to get their privacy back. Not that they would be much better off with Windows, given that now Microsoft have turned into spyware pushers as well.

Re: ewaste of the future

[Chardros]

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.

Re: ewaste of the future

[terjeber]

has handed out nothing but Mac laptops, while running production services on EC2

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.