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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.
I work in higher ed (community/state college with only a few 4yr programs) and we were discussing G vs MS the other day. K-12 in my area also uses G and Chromebooks. We are a MS shop with no G usage other than installing Chrome on PCs. How do we best prepare our students in general? (not specific majors or trade programs)
Do we stick with MS to compliment their G suite knowledge gained in K-12? Do we switch to G to match what they are learning in K-12. Do we let the students use both and decide? Do we try to match what the universities are using to prepare transferring students?
More and more about companies choosing the GSuite over Microsoft. It is big companies as well as small. My stance was that we should at least offer some chrome devices in labs and public areas to gauge student interest.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Since Microsoft (Win10) started spying on it's users the question is whether Google's spying is any worse.
Without good legislation these large (US) companies will only increase their snooping, especially children that have no choice need to be protected against any harvesting of their data.
See my sig.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Remember when it was the Mac that was going to threaten Microsoft Windows dominance because they were often found in schools? Yeah. Well, it didn't exactly happen. Macs made some gains, from about 4% to 12% today, but it was more from being good computers not OS addictions.
The major fallacy is that there is more to business computing than just Microsoft Office. In fact, there is a lot more. Most jobs require their employees to learn and utilize a small host of different applications. Many of those are developed in-house. Many, many of those applications simply don't exist on other platforms, or at least not nearly to the same quality. If your software that you use doesn't exist on a rival platform, or you would have to spend lots and lots of money training and migrating over to another program, then why would you do that?
I mean, for gawd sake, companies -lots and lots of companies- are still using Oricle. You think they are going to switch to Chromebooks? You are insane.
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.
Trying to herd all the productive users.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The docking clamshell should let the phone be docked where the trackpad is and allow it to be used as a touch interface.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I am a consultant currently working at a large client that has completely replaced MS office with G-Suite, including GMail for email. But that is the absolute extent to which any Google "cloud" applications are used. The rest of the environment (desktop wise) is a mixture of Windows 10, Linux, and Mac, also using both Azure and AWS for development via Visual Studio, VSCode, Eclipse, I mean, whatever they want to use honestly. They also use Power BI, and a handful of other data analytics tools that I've never heard of. Anyway, I could keep going, but my point is that most companies do so much more that just cant be done on a Chromebook. It's incredibly naive, and just plain ignorant to assume that a platform serving K-12 schools is even going to come close to providing the same functionality that companies use. Hell, I rarely ever even open any office suite type applications anymore, with the exception of needing to make the occasional flow chart. Anybody that needs to do REAL work is going to need to break out of the Chromebook walled garden, and get on a real desktop OS.
I work in a school in the UK. I'm currently having arguments over exactly this subject: the powers that be want to roll out Google quickly (having already wasted *lots* of money on some iPads a few years ago, and Asus eeePCs before that). Apparently I'm the only IT guy across the multi-academy Trust who's been kicking up a stink, the rest have just rolled over and moved to Google, Chromebooks and all.
We presently have just under 1000 PCs and laptops running Windows 10 and Office 2016 / Office 365 (the latter for its easier integration with Gmail - feedback is people hate the Gmail website but get on well with Outlook). I'm doing my damndest to make sure that any new devices also run Windows and Office, so as to hook into our existing network. Pointing out that cheap laptops can do everything a Chromebook can, plus hook into our existing infrastructure has delayed the Chromebook push for now (they've already had experience with how awkward printing / file access was with the iPads). I still strongly feel that this whole one-device-per-child thing is a colosal waste of time and taxpayer money, but the sellers in education do a really good job of painting a Utopian picture of classrooms full of kids all eagerly collaborating with teacher. (What actually happens, of course, is a good chunk off them instead browse photos / websites / play games etc).
It doesn't help that there are political moves afoot to force a move to Google, such as banning removable drives (which I'm resisting, currently enforcing Bitlocker for write access). Banning removable drives would, of course, stop our SLR cameras in Photography from working, stop teachers recording the children using our video cameras on the school farm (for Animal Care), stop audio CDs being burnt for speaking and listening exams in French, stop them recording performances in Drama (again, on nice video cameras), stop potential teachers and people coming in from outside using memory sticks for their lessons / presentations and much more besides.
Google Apps isn't perfect either - as well as having less-than-great viewers for Office formats, it has no answer for Access, something which is deeply embedded in the curriculum. That means we need Office and proper PCs in our IT suites... and as such we may as well keep it elsewhere too.
I suspect, though, that eventually moves will be made to move our network storage to Google Drive, despite the lack of being able, for example, to get an Access database back from last Tuesday, as it's been overwritten by mistake. They're already planning to migrate email away from Exchange to Gmail by next summer.
Mind you, there is one thing from all this. I was brought up with Windows (2) and Office (Word 1, Excel 2) at school back in the 90s. It's quite true that if you get them at school, they'll carry it over into their adult lives...
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?
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.
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.